Training Articles

The learning and development world has evolved since I walked into my first CHART conference 30 years ago, but the fundamentals remain, and the need for shared growth has never been more urgent. It’s time to stop checking boxes and begin broadcasting your growth. Instead of treating learning as a behind-the-scenes activity, Loud Learning turns every lesson into a conversation, every mistake into a teaching moment, and every achievement into a shared win. Want to shape culture, not just support it? Get loud about learning. It's how we normalize development, magnetize mentorship, and show that growth is everyone’s business.

At the inaugural Tampa-area Regional Training Forum, trainers dove into how AI can enhance humanity—not replace it. With 94% of training pros now seeing AI as critical to their success, the conversation focused on real-world uses that simplify work, empower teams, and support inclusivity. The big idea? Shift from compliance to curiosity. Let teams play in the sandbox, explore new tools, and build confidence—not just complete courses. Because at the end of the day, tech doesn’t drive hospitality—people do.

We have a growing crisis in the frontline workforce: skills masking, where employees hide gaps in their abilities – something 58% admit to doing. In an industry driven by speed, this hidden issue leads to inconsistent performance, stalled growth, and retention challenges. Instead of chasing the newest AI tools, let’s start with clear operational objectives and build training that develops true confidence and mastery. The solution is “training time travel”—using game-based simulations and active learning to compress years of experience into moments of safe practice, feedback, and repetition.

Thanksgiving reminds us to be grateful, and CHART President Kelly McCutcheon has an extra tip as we enter the holiday season: to get the most bang for your gratitude buck, get specific! Backed by positive psychology research, she shares how targeted appreciation can improve resilience, optimism, and team morale—without requiring a big time investment. Steal her simple weekly gratitude practice, and check out tools like a free app she found to help turn thankfulness into a habit.

Fun at work isn’t fluff—it’s a strategy. James Frank makes the case that joy isn’t just nice to have, it’s a catalyst for engagement, creativity, collaboration, and performance. Through hands-on activities at the recent Redondo Beach conference (Tower Challenge, anyone?), he showed how intentional fun fosters culture and retention. Want peak performance? Build a foundation of well-being and joy. Facing barriers like remote work or lack of time? Schedule fun like any other priority, empower “fun champions,” and make it inclusive. Bottom line: fun is not the opposite of serious work. It is serious work done better.

For so many of us, hospitality isn’t just a job—it’s a calling. But somewhere along the way, our industry seems to have drifted from its roots of warmth and human connection. Once the home for flexible work, growth opportunities, and community gathering, hospitality is now competing with gig work, influencer culture, and on-demand expectations. In this CHART Talk, Audrey calls for a return to the heart of hospitality: loving strangers. Her mission is to shift focus from “what’s in it for me” to “what’s in it for all,” so teams, managers, and guests feel valued, supported, and truly welcomed. If you’ve ever felt like something essential has gone missing in our hotels and restaurants, this article and CHART Talk is for you.

When used strategically, AI is a serious time-saver and capacity multiplier for hospitality L&D teams. Here are 5 practical ways AI can ease your workload: acting as a brainstorming partner, repurposing existing content in minutes, making resources easier to find, building accessibility into learning, and freeing you up to focus on strategy and people. Tools like ChatGPT, Otter.ai, and YouTube auto-captioning aren’t futuristic—they’re ready now. If you’re short on time but long on training needs, this is your cheat sheet to working smarter, not harder.

Hospitality pros are masters of the “everything’s fine” smile—even when life is anything but. That’s emotional labor: the internal strain of showing the right face at work no matter what’s really going on under the surface. As leaders and trainers, we can equip our teams with the tools they need to care for guests in authentic and meaningful ways while managing their own emotions and stress. Emotional labor will always be part of hospitality, but how we prepare our people to handle it makes all the difference. If we only train them to “perform,” they burn out. If we give them tools to genuinely align how they feel with what they show, we build resilience, connection, and longevity.

ROI is an important measure of L&D program success, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Leaders should also take into account the effort and burden that goes into making learning programs work. Enter the concept of “Return on Hassle” (ROH)—a fresh metric that quantifies how much stress, resistance, and friction a training initiative requires. Why does hassle matter? Because high-ROI programs still fail if they exhaust your team. By scoring hassle across six categories, you can calculate ROH and see if your effort is really worth it. Use this dual-metric approach to prioritize sustainable, scalable programs—and finally retire the ones that drain more than they deliver.

When we launched our “Be Bold” in-person leadership conference at Jack in the Box, it felt like we’d nailed it. The energy, the inspiration, and the feedback was everything we hoped for. But once our district managers got back to their day-to-day priorities, that excitement faded. Binders full of ideas just couldn’t compete with the realities of running a restaurant and logistical issues made it challenging to include everyone. We knew we needed a new path forward, so we made the boldest move yet—we pivoted. We built Cravers, a blended learning program that’s fast, flexible, and built for real life. Designed for on-the-job, just-in-time learning, Cravers is flexible, modern, and rooted in the realities of restaurant life. The big lesson? Sometimes the best plan is the one you create after Plan A.

It has been two years since I published my first article on "closing the back door," and though some things have improved, hospitality is still bleeding talent. Wages haven't caught up, schedules are still a mess, and burnout is rampant. The new danger isn't quitting, it's "quiet cracking," where employees are still showing up but mentally checking out. If we want people to stay, we need more than surface-level fixes. That means making psychological safety non-negotiable, building real career paths, and holding leaders accountable for culture. If we only run in place and react, we'll keep losing the people we depend on. It's time to get off of the treadmill, make employee experience and retention a leadership strategy, and create an environment that doesn't make people want to run for the back door.

What if your next training session had your team hooked like their favorite can't-miss Netflix series? After studying what makes streaming shows addictive, I came up with 3 secrets to making your training binge-worthy and 4 elements that all good stories need (including the story you are telling through training). Designing your training as if you were producing a hit Netflix series will keep your learners engaged and coming back for more.