Bartenders right around Australia have, sadly, found themselves with a lot more free time on their hands than they have wanted.
The government’s shutdown of bars around the country has come into effect Monday — you can read more about that here — and the move means that the large majority of staff working in the bar industry will not be going to work for the foreseeable future.
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews today suggested today that the measure will be in place for quite some time. “These restrictions come into force from midday today and will remain in force until midnight April 13th,” he said. “It is highly likely that they will be further extended beyond that.”
Although we don’t know when the government will allow bars to reopen, we do know that the restrictions will lift at some point. Many bartenders will need to take advantage of the income support packages the prime minister announced yesterday, and we’ve got some advice on how to do that here.
It also means that this period of relative downtime could be used to upgrade your bar knowledge and skill.
Sven Almenning’s Ananas training program is an online training and development platform and they have decided to make the program free to individuals and to venues during the months of April and May.
It’s a great initiative aimed at assisting the industry in being ready to get back to work, stringer than before.
See below for the details.
For staff/individuals:
All the training on Ananas is available for free during April and May (and this may be extended if need be).
It will allow “all hospitality staff who want to use this period to study and learn and to earn certification that will help them land a job when this eventually passes and the world resumes some kind of normality,” Almenning says.
To sign up for free and create an account, visit AnanasAcademy.com.
“As of right now only our Basic Certificate is available for free,” says Almenning, “but we’ll have all the training available for free for all new users ASAP — hopefully by Monday or Tuesday.”
“The training on here really is second to none, and besides being the go-to training for us, ANANAS is also being used by a number of other awesome bar and restaurant groups as well,” he says.” We encourage everyone to start with the Basic certificate first. If they think they know it already – then just skip the training and go straight to the test. The Intermediate Certificate should be great for most people in the industry regardless of previous experience.”
The training isn’t tied to any brands, and they have worked with a number of the bartending world’s best and brightest to bring the modules to life. “The training has been designed by the industry and for the industry and has been designed to deliver value in venue – not to deliver marketing spiels for powerful brands,” says Almenning.
For bar and restaurant groups:
“Ananas was specifically built to help bar and restaurant groups manage their staff’s learning journey and to give them visibility of their team’s capabilities,” says Almenning. “It’s also an awesome on-boarding tool.”
This resource for operators will also be free during April and May.
“Tthis includes existing users as well – basically a form of “rent relief” while we are in these tough times,” says Almenning. Operators using the program will be provided all venues “with handy templates for their internal training,” he says. “A lack of documented processes and procedures (even recipes etc) are common in our industry, and we thought we’d help fix this for as many as we can during the coming downturn.”
Venues and groups wanting to take advantage of this can contact Russ@AnanasAcademy.com to have their free account set-up now.