After completing their internships at our 17 partner hotels, the students prepare to sit their end-of-year exams before moving on to their first jobs in the hotel sector. As is the case every year, the Sala Baï team will make sure that 100% of them are hired in record time.
18 June 2018 in the morning: the second group of students who went off to do their internships two months ago are back at Sala Baï. The whole student body is together again. The traditional national anthem that is sung every day as the flag is raised sounds out even louder and the school’s classrooms are full again!
The priority now is preparation for the end-of-year exams. During their training, the Sala Baï students will have completed four months’ of internship (2.5 months for Beauty Treatment) in 4- or 5-star hotels in Siem Reap.
A Sala Baï education is a passport to employment. It enables young Cambodians to escape poverty and integrate the hotel sector in record time. The programme alternates between theoretical classes and professional practice, at the school or during internships at our partner hotels.
Encouraged by their practical training in real conditions, the students are keen to share and compare their experiences. During the flag-raising ceremony which takes place every day at 8am, each of them will explain to their classmates what they have taken away from their first two experiences in the hotel sector, the problems they encountered and their best memories.
Internships are fantastic opportunities for students to get to know their future professional environment. Putting into practice what they have learnt in luxury hotels, contact with international clients and working alongside hotel staff are all experiences that help them to gain self-confidence and make the training a success.
For our 17 partner hotels that take in the Sala Baï students, it’s a way of supporting the vocational training of the future employees of the Cambodian hotel industry. In order to consolidate this commitment, all of our partner hotels help to finance the training by paying internship stipends directly to the school so that we can maintain Sala Baï as a free-of-charge school. The amount of the internship stipend has been harmonised since September 2017, the result of a joint action led by hotel schools that are members of ASSET H&C (Association of Southeast Asian Social Enterprises for Training in Hospitality & Catering) and based in Cambodia.
August, the last month of the training, is given over entirely to looking for a job, with the assistance of the five social workers in the team. Some of our partner hotels go on to hire interns directly (this applied to half of the class of 2016-2017.)
The main local players in the hotel and restaurant sector recognise the quality of our training and play a role in the training and employment of Sala Baï students. Today, 100% of graduates are employed within a month of graduation and are on average paid a monthly salary well above the average family income in Cambodia. Students are thus able to help their families financially which means that their younger brothers and sisters are able to stay on and finish school.
Over the year, students have been preparing for this crucial job-searching period through workshops focusing on know-how. Run by the school’s social workers and specialised outside trainers, these workshops focus on learning to work in a team, inter-personal communication and adapting to a multi-cultural working environment.
In order to ensure that all students are hired in the weeks following graduation, the social workers provide them with advice and guidance throughout the month of August. They centralise job offers and keep up with what’s happening on the market so that they can steer students towards hotels that are looking for staff. Day after day, the Sala Baï team monitors the hiring process on a case-by-case basis, until all of the students have been hired.