I didn’t know it’d be peeling carrots all day!” said one. “I thought I’d be managing the pass,” said another.

These sorts of comments - from hospitality and professional cookery students who had recently graduated from West Lothian College - got us thinking.

Students were landing good jobs after graduating at locations ranging from five-star hotels to independent cafés, but they were also telling us that they were not fully prepared for the reality of starting a career in the catering and hospitality industry and what might be expected of them.

A lack of skills wasn’t the issue. For our course, we have a highly successful, working restaurant at the college - The Terrace Restaurant - that we use as a training hub for everything we teach students, to ensure they have the qualifications required for starting jobs in a professional environment.

The restaurant is number one in the local area on Tripadvisor and has been for five years, and it also holds the title of South-East Scotland Restaurant of the Year and has won Scottish Restaurant of the Year, so the expectations of our students are high.

However, the feedback from past students made us realise that they perhaps weren’t getting an accurate experience of a realworld restaurant environment because in our restaurant, students take on the responsibility of every position in the kitchen, under the watchful eye of their lecturer.

As such, we decided that we would bring in a placement provision to the course, starting with second- and third-year students in 2018 and then from 2019 including first years as well - and not just for a single day, but for two or three days, requiring them to either stay on site or travel to work, like real professionals.

Of course, for first-year students this could have been a risk: if they were overwhelmed or didn’t enjoy the experience, they may have chosen not to return for their second year. However, we thought it was an important opportunity not only to enable them to start putting the skills they were learning into practice in real-world environments, but also to show them the reality of working in professional hospitality and catering.

It no doubt helped that we were able to find an array of interesting placement locations for them - from five-star hotels such as Gleneagles and Trump Turnberry to independent community cafés, contract caterers and bakeries, such as Gather and Gather, based at Sky in Livingston, and Glasgow-based Tantrum Doughnuts.

While organising these connections may sound like a lot of work, the reality was that once we started reaching out to contacts we all had from our time spent working in the industry, we quickly grew a network of venues willing to help with placements through word of mouth and social media.

What’s more, we wanted to ensure that the placements lasted for more than a day, so we were lucky that many placements were happy to provide accommodation for students on site; for some of the smaller companies, we were able to use the college’s work experience fund to cover transport and any accommodation costs. It was important to make sure that there were not piles of paperwork for the businesses to fill out, as we all know how busy those environments are and we did not want to burden them with anything more than the basics.

This was all, though - we left the venues totally in charge of how they worked with students to allow our learners to see how every establishment works differently. Some created agendas and training programmes; others just planned their days around the demands of the business at that moment.

Again, we thought it was important for the students to see the reality of how different locations work, as this would give them a raft of different insights to share afterwards.

All that was left was to decide was which students would work where. We started by asking our students about the sort of environment they saw themselves working in in the future and where they would be comfortable being placed now.

We also brought our own views on where we thought students would thrive and benefit from working.

Some were really shocked when we told them that they were going to the two-Michelin-star Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, under the watchful eye of Stephen McLaughlin; The Kitchin, Café Andaluz and Cadiz in Edinburgh; as well as independent cafes and contract caterers. For some, this may have been daunting, but we were confident that they would rise to the challenge and really benefit from what they would experience.

Once they went off, we didn’t leave them totally alone. We thought it important that we made time to see them all during their placements - both to show the students that we were interested in their experience, and to show the restaurants that we valued their time and help.

Given that these locations were spread out across Scotland, this was no simple task, involving a 4am start, 10pm finish and driving around 200 miles to see many of them on one of the days - but it was unquestionably a very useful effort.

After the placements ended, we got all the students together for a debrief to share insights on what they had learned. It was great to see them interested in each other’s experiences, their surprise at the different ways that locations operated and their sharing ideas and tips that they had picked up.

In fact, it was noticeable how much their professionalism and teamwork grew after the placements. Before, we might have asked students to do something in a certain way and really pushed them to treat the training kitchen as a real work environment, but you could tell they didn’t buy into it as they were too familiar and comfortable here.

Once they came back from the training placements, there was a clear sense that they knew what we were asking them to do was exactly how it is in the real world.

For example, before, if some students had finished their area of responsibilities, they would often spend time talking and distract others. After their placements, though, they would actively offer to help others who were still working. Students started to offer peer learning, showing a skill they had learned at their placement to others unprompted if they could sense that someone was struggling with a task. They wanted everyone to benefit from what they had learned. As a tutor, this is so rewarding to witness.

The placements also helped students to see the reality of some of the other requirements of working in a hospitality setting that we would have struggled to get them to understand - such as the importance of time keeping, having a clean and ironed uniform and not letting your team down.

In fact, one student who had to miss a shift during his placement because he was ill felt so bad about letting his colleagues down that he went in on a Saturday to make up the shift he had missed.

And, of course, this hands-on training did wonders for cookery confidence and skills, too. For example, two students who spent time at Tantrum Doughnuts brought back their doughnut-making skills and used them to help run a charity baking day at the college where they made more than 1,000 doughnuts to be sold to raise money for a local charity.

And perhaps even more notably, we took 40 of our students to the HRC (formerly Hotelympia) show this year, where they competed against industry professionals and students with one or two years’ more experience than them.

They took away 20 bronze and seven silver medals and you could just see the confidence they had throughout - confidence they had definitely gained during their placements.

Sadly, this year’s placements have been postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak. It’s a real shame, but students will definitely return next year to continue the success we have seen so far. Students are obviously not in college at the moment; however, their culinary skills are on display on Twitter and Instagram as they post pictures of what they are cooking at home.

Overall, the success we have seen demonstrates the impact that a blend of vocational training and real-world industry experience can provide.

This is crucial to help students understand the value of what they are learning and how it can support a journey to an interesting, varied and exciting career - no matter how many carrots they may have to peel.

The three authors all work at West Lothian College: Audrey Buckley is a hospitality lecturer who has worked in numerous restaurants in the UK and US; Paul Devonshire is a chef lecturer and former head chef at the Gleneagles Hotel; and Alex Sykakis is a chef lecturer who spent 17 years working in the US before working in the Sheraton Hotel in Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 8 May 2020 issue under the headline “Cooking up a plan to give students a real taste of work”