Hygiene Academy courses enhance employees’ work-related skills, alongside knowledge of techniques required to progress to the next stage of their career

 

Global hygiene and cleaning company Diversey has launched its cloud-based Hygiene Academy training platform for food and beverage (F&B) professionals. The Hygiene Academy enables employers – including HR, Training, and Line Managers – to manage and develop their own tailored training programmes, to improve the knowledge and skillsets of their manufacturing and processing staff. With hygiene fundamental in the F&B industries, integrating Diversey’s knowledge into their operations is an essential step for any company wishing to minimise risks to food safety and their brand reputation.

 

Diversey tackles the skills gap with convenience of e-learning

The Hygiene Academy’s e-learning programme recognizes one of the most important issues in the F&B industry, as Fabrizio Tardioli, Director, Global Food Safety Solutions, Diversey explains, “The skills gap is one of the main challenges the global food and beverage industries are facing today. The industry is characterised by frequent staff turnover and this means face-to-face training can be difficult to manage and very expensive. Ensuring that your  workforce is trained to perform to their best is quite another challenge.” The urgency of the issue is reinforced by an Economist survey which reveals that 50 per cent of food companies positioned labour challenges and specifically skilled labour, as their primary challenge.

 

Hygiene Academy courses enhance employees’ work-related skills, alongside knowledge of techniques required to progress to the next stage of their career. The benefits of the Hygiene Academy meet the three key challenges identified by a market research study into employment in the F&B market across the European Union. An ageing workforce highlights the need to develop staff in production roles, thereby ensuring progression into technical or managerial positions to counter a shortfall. Rapid innovation in processing technologies means site engineers, managers and technologists need ‘precise knowledge’ on the systems and technologies in use. The study also considers labour productivity could be increased by improving the basic skills and knowledge of specific methods of production.

 

Global leaders providing a flexible learning solution

Diversey’s Hygiene Academy offers targeted solutions to training challenges and high employee turnover. It delivers effective management of training costs while embracing and driving a culture of quality and consistency throughout. With research showing that e-learning has the power to increase employee’s knowledge retention rate by up to 60 per cent, the Hygiene Academy’s online bite-size training modules provide maximum convenience across all devices. Learners can be assigned to specific courses or course bundles.

The course bundles are grouped under four main headings. Essential courses are dedicated to the basic principles of hygiene, while application courses have been developed for specific hygiene applications commonly found in the F&B industry, such as OPC, CIP and bottle washing. Process courses move participants on to an advanced level dedicated to site-wide best practices, including GMP for food plants, hygienic design and allergens management. The fourth bundle covers specific microbes that pose key threats to food industry hygiene and impact F&B production via direct or cross-contamination.

 

Companies will find the Academy an attractive option as there is no requirement to invest in expensive hardware or software and training can be consistently delivered across the workforce. Accountability is ensured by tracking employee participation, with their performance and progress at employee, site and/or country level efficiently monitored through the user dashboard. Courses are available in eight languages – English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese – which, in addition to increasing the Academy’s global reach, supports customers employing an international workforce.