Agency Investigates the New Restaurant Market
BY BEN STEPHENS

A private, nonprofit agency that trains thousands of Las Vegas' culinary employees each year is commissioning a study to gauge whether the work force is meeting the market's changing needs.

The move is, in part, a response to the resort industry's shift over the last decade from casual to fine dining.

Nevada Partners solicited proposals earlier this month from companies to conduct a skills-gap analysis to determine the local labor pool's shortfalls. It also wants to know how the organization's training program could be tailored to train employees better.

MIKE STOTTS | BUSINESS PRESS Culinary student Derrick Duffie places the finishing touches on a Tia Noodle Salad entree he prepared at the Culinary Training Academy.

Nevada Partners officials acknowledge there is a skills gap, but say the gap has yet to be quantified. The analysis is expected to be finished by August. It will help set a direction for training over the next 12 years for what Department of Employment Training and Rehabilitation statistics show is one of the state's fastest-growing job sectors.

"The (skills) gap is already in existence," Rose McKinney-James, chairwoman of Nevada Partners' board of directors, said. "But I think we are being proactive in finding a way to address that gap."

The need to adapt is becoming more urgent with MGM Mirage's CityCenter and Boyd Gaming Corp.'s Echelon Place on the horizon, McKinney-James said. Now is the time to position culinary workers to move into the higher-end venues those two properties and others will likely offer.

McKinney-James said Wynn Las Vegas approached the organization, funded by the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board, to enter a partnership that would help it understand the market's needs. The partnership enabled Nevada Partners to win a $75,000 state grant to pay for the study.

McKinney-James said now is the time to target not only the unemployed, but "the underemployed" -- employed culinary workers who seek career advancement, but who may lack some skills. She said providing better training will create long-term opportunities and put culinary employees into solid occupations.

Nevada Partners CEO Steven Horsford says Las Vegas continues to reinvent itself every 10 years, and the market needs to follow suit. Thirty years ago someone could come become a cook with no formal training, but this is not the case anymore, especially in finer dining venues, he said.

"Las Vegas is no longer the buffet capital of the world," he said.