Q&A: Ellen Kessler shares how Hilton is strategically boosting frontline skills and internal talent

Labor availability remains a significant challenge in the hospitality industry despite the growing rates of travel around the world. As a result, many travel and hospitality companies are taking steps to attract new candidates and retain current team members while enhancing their employer value propositions

Hilton, one of the world’s leading hospitality companies and No. 1 World’s Best Workplace, has been on a multi-year journey to create a workplace culture that values growth, learning, and both personal and professional development for its team members. In 2022, Hilton was first in the hospitality industry to launch a strategic education benefit with Guild to empower its frontline team members working in its owned, managed, and corporate properties and offices to gain skills that match in-demand jobs available in the company. 

The benefit is tuition-free and barrier-free, meaning there are no financial barriers team members need to navigate to take advantage of the benefit. On day one, Hilton team members have access to gain the skills they need to advance or upskill within the company – strengthening their experiences while allowing the business to strategically invest to fill talent pipelines.

In this Q&A, Ellen Kessler, Hilton’s Sr. Director of Commercial, Corporate and Continuing Education, delves into the strategy behind the program, tips on getting stakeholder buy-in, and the tangible benefits the partnership has brought to both Hilton team members and to Hilton's bottom line.

Q: What opportunities were you most excited about by introducing a more broadly-accessible education benefit?

Growth is a pillar of Hilton’s culture and a large part of our value proposition, and we want to do more to provide growth and upskilling opportunities for our property-based team members in particular. Through our partnership with Guild, we’re thrilled to be offering this cost-free and barrier-free program to expand professional development and upskilling opportunities for everyone, from our corporate team members to our front desk team members. 

Through Guild, we’re able to enable our team members to build the skills and credentials to open the door to even more opportunities within Hilton. They get the opportunity to learn new skills and grow their professional career while Hilton gets to retain its valuable team members and promote equitable opportunity across our workforce. 

Q: How did you foster excitement and buy-in among decision-makers as you brought this upskilling effort to life? 

At Hilton, our goal is to create a pipeline of talent in our hotels while continuing to expand our global footprint. Our culture has always been one that supports professional growth and learning for our teams, so we were proud to be able to offer this benefit to eligible team members. 

We made sure to bring in decision-makers and highlight our vision of how this could help us meet this need to better attract, retain, and grow top talent. We emphasized the business impact through data and stories, and really worked to keep the program at the forefront of our leaders’ attention. 

So far, we’ve seen a great impact on retention — even for people who just register to explore the benefit but aren’t yet enrolled. Since launching, we’ve seen a notable decrease in the annual turnover rate among our property-based team members. It is clear that this offering is helping team members grow their careers, and also has a positive impact on the bottom line. It’s a win-win, and we continually talk about those numbers when we talk about the benefit.

Q: How have you approached encouraging your frontline managers to encourage their teams to take advantage of the education benefit to drive business outcomes? Where have you seen the most value so far?  

It really is important to have a constant drumbeat of communication about the program. We use every channel we have to get the word out to frontline managers and beyond; it involves continuous marketing and consistent outreach. 

For example, we have ongoing information sessions with hotel leaders as well as office hours. We tie the education offering into career conversations that occur throughout the year as part of our career development process, and it’s also part of conversations in onboarding, talent and succession planning, and so on. We talk about it in quarterly business updates, and in our regular meeting cadence with other senior leaders. Our HR consultants and learning consultants know about it as well.

We reach far and wide to get the message out, and we stay consistent with our story. We highlight it as a “cost-free, barrier-free” benefit, and it’s associated with our continuing education programs. Retention impact, popular programs, and team member success stories are all highlighted in communications as well.

Q: Are there specific skills or competencies that Hilton is focusing on to ensure team members can prepare for career mobility?  

The competencies we focus on differ by role, but some of the most common skills include project management, language learning, and data analysis; these core skills are popular with team members and serve as foundational competencies for career growth. However, through Guild, we’re also able to offer programs like high school completion or college credit courses, helping team members realize their dreams of graduating from high school or finishing college.  

We also help team members deepen their skills in hospitality more generally. The talent pool has shifted in recent years — in the past, people would go to school in hospitality or have extensive experience in hotels. Now, we hire people newer to the industry, so we love helping them gain skills to be more confident in customer service and hospitality so they can better serve our guests.

We’re excited to dive deeper into intentional career mobility — that’s the next phase of our program. We’re starting to identify specific, more complex roles and beginning to map out how we can leverage Guild alongside other resources to accelerate the speed to proficiency for those roles, becoming a more of a strategic partner to the business. 

Q: Are there already lessons you’ve learned that might help other HR business leaders?

In the US, this type of offering is becoming less of a differentiator and more of an expectation for employers. Fortune 500 companies with large frontline populations are all investing in education and skilling to remain competitive in tight labor markets and we will continue to work to ensure we continue on our goal and vision of building strong communities of team members and spreading the light and warmth of hospitality.

Q: What advice would you give to HR teams who may be earlier in their journey on this work?

Start small and keep your end goal in mind. Know the problem(s) you are seeking to solve instead of taking a general, “wide-net” approach. 

For example, while it can and should be an organization-wide effort, it’s helpful to partner with business leaders and approach the initiative as a career growth strategy with specific roles in mind. Identify roles that may be more difficult to fill and align with leaders on how you can solve that by growing talent into those roles. At Hilton, we’re being proactive and approaching this partnership as a talent development strategy rather than a benefit program. 

We loved being able to give team members a lot of choice, and even now we’re seeing that popular programs they’re choosing are also high value offerings to us. So rather than try to boil the ocean, don’t be afraid to start out more targeted so you can build the business case and then expand.

About Beth Knight

Beth is a contributing writer with a passion for thought leadership in the HR space.