YCI Career Training Program in Hospitality

What is the Youth Career Initiative?

The Youth Career Initiative (YCI) is a career education program that provides disadvantaged young people with life and work skills. The overall purpose of the program is to empower young participants to make informed career choices and realise the options available to them, enabling them to improve their employability and enhance their long-term social and economic opportunities.

Each country programme is tailored to suit the local needs of its young people – YCI is used as a tool to tackle or prevent issues such as youth unemployment, social exclusion, poverty, and exploitation. In Viet Nam, the program is focused on on-the-job training of disadvantaged young people in at least 15 different skill areas of of hospitality services. The selected participants will be trained in Opera Hilton Hanoi and Sheraton Hanoi hotels. In the first year (2011), YCI has trained 9 young people. This year the program intends to recruit 18 young people, of which 10 percent are human trafficking victims.

Target Group

Eligible candidates are typically aged between 18-21 years-old, have recently finished high school, are able to make a full-time commitment to the programme, and are considered to be at-risk of exploitation. The program, however, in certain cases also admits young people who have not finished high school but are 18-21 years old and having displayed exceptional potentials to be successful in the training, such as ability to communicate in foreign languages.

Suitable participants should also be able to show a willingness to learn and a desire for self-development but have no other means to improve their lives; this means that they have limited or no opportunities to find decent, legitimate employment or continue in further education.
Programmes are run in Vietnamese, however, candidates with certain level of English will better benefit from further language training that is relevant to the hospitality industry as part of the programme.

Methodology

The programme is designed to be delivered as part of the regular, day-to-day operations of a full-service hotel, since it is built on the back of existing training and development courses the hotels regularly offer to their staff, and it is supplemented with external courses.

Each programme provides over 750 training hours through a combination of theoretical and practical instruction, including mentoring in life and work skills, with most of the teaching coming from senior managers and highly experienced associates from the hotels.

Registration

VCCI, as the coordinator of the program in Viet Nam, is inviting organizations and projects who support disadvantaged youth to suggest potential candidates for the program, as we believe this will be the best way to target the right beneficiaries. Please make your enquiries before to the following address:
Ms. Nguyen Thi Quynh Nga
Vietnam Business Council for Sustainable Development (VBCSD), VCCI
4th Floor, VCCI Building, 9 ?ào Duy Anh, ??ng ?a, Hà N?i
T: + 84 4 3574 4002 I F: + 84 4 3577 2699
E: [email protected] I W: http://vbcsd.vn