GREEN ISLAND, Hanover — Sandals Corporate University (SCU) Senior Corporate Director Dr Luz Longsworth is calling for a collaborative approach to creating content for training.

The hotel group is currently focused on leveraging artificial intelligence in crafting and assessing the impact of its training programmes. It has reportedly seen benefits to that approach.

“Let’s start a movement, and that’s a collaborative element that we have been talking about. It is not enough for one company or one group of people to be adopting this — we think the entire industry needs to come together to create content for training so that we can enhance our human capital. This is the future. The future is the present right now,” said Longsworth.

She was among panellists discussing ,‘The Strategic Use of Digital Solutions for Destination Resilience and Sustainability’, during the recent Global Tourism Resilience Conference and Expo which was held at Princess Grand Resort in Green Island, Hanover.

During the presentation the senior corporate director reviewed the journey that Sandals, through SCU, had embarked on over the past five years.

The university was launched in 2012, at a time when all learning and development tools were manual. To date, SCU has served 20,297 team members across nine countries within the Caribbean.

In 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, Sandals acquired and launched a learning management system that assisted in creating a sustainable training model. The learning management system now has more than 100,000 digital courses available for free to all team members.

This is being used primarily for online courses that are self-paced. It allows for the tracking of training completion, scholarship applications, and approvals. It also allows for performance evaluation as it keeps track of all training hours and sessions.

In 2023 Sandals launched its virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence tools for training.

“We have moved fairly quickly, I would say, in 13 years — from pen and paper into digital,” stated Longsworth.

She gave an example of Sandals’ rapid adaptation of digital training.

“Between 2019 [and] 2024 we issued 158,152 digital certificates to our team members at Sandals. Almost half of that number has accrued within the last 12 months,” Longsworth said.

She also provided examples of achievements made in the area of environmental health and food safety training.

“While we were doing training in a face-to-face environment, we were clocking something like over 1,000 hours of training time of the trainer in preparing [and] delivering to the target group. We were also clocking total training days, over 200. You are talking about the target group taking eight months to complete their training — we have transformed that using our digital tools,” explained Longsworth.

“We no longer need to use our training hours for our learning and development professionals; they are now allocated to a lot of other things. And, we have moved from eight months to complete the target group to three months. In three months we can complete 80 per cent of our staff doing the environmental health and food safety training versus eight months before. They are ready to go out on the floor and be very good employees,” she added.

The use of technology has also reduced paper consumption by 71 per cent.

“We have a diploma in hospitality leadership that we [offer in] partner[ship] with FIU [Florida International University] and a company called ALS [Accelerating Leaders]. If we are going to do a manual application process, which is the old system, we would be using somewhere in the range of nine sheets of paper just for the application. With our new system we are using about three. What does that work out for, for our 2024 applicants? Instead of using over 1,200 sheets of papers just for the applications, we are using 357 sheets — and that is a 71 per cent savings just on paper,” argued Longsworth, who said this also makes the process more efficient.