The National Skills Strategy – which will be published on 7 March by People 1st – contains some alarming statistics.

It estimates that labour turnover will cost the industry £6.2bn by 2012. By then, we will have recruited and lost 4.1 million people.

It says that one-third of employers are not training their staff and only 71 per cent offer induction training – perhaps the simplest but almost certainly the most important training that can be undertaken, as so many workers leave within the first few weeks.

These few statistics paint a very gloomy picture of the industry. How are we tackling it?

Many employers say that the changes in education and training in the last 20 years have been too much, too frequent, too fast, and typically far too complicated for them industry to cope with. Hence, no training.

Yet, here comes People 1st with a new Sector Skills Strategy, which is very long on new aims and objectives, in craft, supervisory and management training and education. So yet more change! Will there be any more training as a result?

Good question! Yes, we must train more people, more thoroughly. But it’s vital that employers understand what’s going on, what the Strategy is all about and why it’s being introduced. People 1st really has the most fiercesome promotional battle on its hands here.

For the strategy to succeed, the industry must co-operate, support, and partner these new developments, many of which are highly desirable. Employers must understand why we need to re-introduce apprenticeships; why we need to re-introduce City and Guilds qualifications – and what these developments will mean.

We just cannot afford to fail in getting the message across – and the reasoning behind it. We all need to play our part in this exercise: trade associations, professional bodies, public agencies, government.

But this is not something that can be achieved overnight. We must be realistic. All but 10 per cent of the industry’s 300,000 businesses are independently owned and operated, most of them with only a few employees. We need to prioritise our efforts to ensure we make the most of our delivery so that the greatest benefit can be gained by the maximum number of businesses.

There is, however, one persuasive word that’s missing from the Sector Skills Strategy: profit.

It’s a word that everybody understands; it’s the key driver for any business. Profit (maybe called a surplus in some sectors) is the reason why we run a business. Maintaining and enhancing profit is the reason why we need to train. If greater skills don’t increase profit, why spend money enabling staff to acquire skills?

People 1st sees productivity as the key driver. I beg to differ. Productivity is a meaningless word to many in hospitality. It’s only through the profit incentive that we can encourage the poorly performing to be good and the good to be even better. If we do this, we will increase productivity as an added bonus – however that might be calculated. It’s the creation of greater profit that will really persuade employers to train.