Australian hospitality takes on 2.43 people who are new to employment for every one who arrives from another job, the highest ratio of any industry, so training is not an extra in this business, it is the intake process.
Skai Solutions took that ratio from ABS Job Mobility for the year to February 2026. What follows is the part nobody costs: where the paid hours come from, what an hour of shadowing is worth at the 2026-27 award rates, and the clause that makes four short training sessions cost more than one long one.
Almost every article on this subject assumes a training budget, a manual and an afternoon when the venue is closed. Most restaurants have none of the three. What they have is a roster, an award that prices every hour on it, and a new starter who has to be useful by Friday.
So the useful version of this question is not what to teach. It is where the paid hours come from, and what the award does to the cost of putting them in the wrong shape.
Start with the fact that makes hospitality different, because it is measurable and almost nobody quotes it. The ABS Job Mobility, February 2026 counts how people arrived in their current job over the year to February 2026.
| Industry | New entrants to employment (000) | Changed employer (000) | New entrants per job changer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accommodation and food services | 198.9 | 81.8 | 2.43 |
| Retail trade | 179.7 | 96.0 | 1.87 |
| Health care and social assistance | 231.0 | 157.6 | 1.47 |
| Education and training | 95.2 | 59.6 | 1.60 |
| Professional, scientific and technical | 102.3 | 115.0 | 0.89 |
| Construction | 85.9 | 124.3 | 0.69 |
Counts from ABS Job Mobility, February 2026, released 31 July 2026. The final column is Skai Solutions' arithmetic on the ABS counts, checked across all 19 industry divisions. Accommodation and food services is the highest of the 19.
Read the last column again. In construction and professional services, most people who started a job in the past year came from another job, so they arrived already knowing how to hold a shift. In hospitality, for every person who arrived from another employer, roughly two and a half arrived from outside employment altogether. Training is not an investment this industry chooses to make. It is the intake process.
Two people are on the clock, which is the part most costings miss. On the Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide for the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 applying from 1 July 2026, the relevant casual rates are the ordinary hourly rate plus the 25% casual loading.
| Classification | Hourly | Casual hourly |
|---|---|---|
| Introductory | A$25.74 | A$32.18 |
| Level 1, food and beverage attendant grade 1 | A$26.44 | A$33.05 |
| Level 2, food and beverage attendant grade 2 | A$27.08 | A$33.85 |
| Level 5, food and beverage supervisor | A$31.30 | A$39.13 |
Adult rates from the Fair Work pay guide published 24 June 2026, applying from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Casual weekend and public holiday rates are set separately in the award and are not the loading stacked on a penalty.
Skai Solutions' worked example, inputs shown. A Level 2 casual trainee at A$33.85 shadowing a Level 5 casual supervisor at A$39.13 costs A$72.98 for every hour they spend together. Ten hours of shadowing before the new person takes a section alone is A$729.80 in wages. Substitute your own classifications and your own shadowing time; the point is that the number has two rates in it, not one.
This is the part of the award that quietly wrecks training plans, and it is in the award text at awards.fairwork.gov.au rather than in any training guide.
A casual must be engaged for at least two consecutive hours per shift. A part time employee must be rostered for at least three hours, and not more than 11.5. So the minimum unit of paid training is not the length of the session. It is the minimum engagement.
Put three hours of induction content into four separate 45 minute sessions and you pay eight hours, because each session drags a two hour minimum behind it. At the Level 2 casual rate that is A$270.80. The same three hours delivered in one block, or attached to the front of shifts the person was already rostered for, costs A$101.55. Identical content, 2.7 times the wage bill. That arithmetic is ours, from the rates and clauses above.
New Zealand has no statutory minimum shift length at all, so the same 45 minute block can be paid as 45 minutes there. The constraint runs the other way instead: an availability provision is only valid where the agreement specifies guaranteed hours and reasonable compensation is paid. Minimum shift hours in hospitality sets out both sides.
Fifteen minutes, your menu, your hardest order.
Book a Free DemoGiven the constraints above, the shape that survives contact with a roster is four shifts, not four sessions.
Two items belong in shift one whatever else gets cut. The first is allergens, because the Food Standards Code names 23 declarable items and the answer has to be right the first time: allergen rules for restaurants covers what is actually required. The second is the phone, because a new starter answering a booking call badly costs a booking, and nobody ever writes that down.
If the induction is fine and the people are gone in six weeks, more training is the wrong fix and an expensive one. Three things to check before redesigning anything.
Classification. Underpayment in this industry is usually many people at 64 to 89 cents an hour rather than one person at A$1.85, because the smallest steps in the award are the ones people argue about. Hospitality award pay levels has the gaps.
Roster stability. Hours that move without notice cost more staff than pay does. Staff roster rules for restaurants sets out what you can and cannot change, and the part time rules are stricter than most operators think.
Whether it is actually turnover. Restaurant staff turnover in Australia puts the industry's rate in context, and the ABS job mobility rate for the whole workforce was 7.2% in the year to February 2026, the lowest reading in a series that starts in 1972. The labour market is less mobile than it was. If your venue is losing people anyway, that is a venue signal rather than a market one.
One thing to settle before you schedule any of this: the award decides whether the time is paid, and in almost every case it is. Our page on paying staff for training sets out the two hour minimum that bites on every separate attendance, and the apprentice obligations that never appear in a pay table.
The phone is the one station that gets no induction in most venues. It is also the one where a new starter is alone, unsupervised, talking to a paying customer, usually in the middle of service. The training answer is a script and a rehearsal, which how to answer the restaurant phone covers. The other answer is to take the call off the new starter entirely during service, which is what Skai Solutions sells, so weigh that accordingly. If your phone mostly carries supplier calls and enquiries rather than orders and bookings, a message-taking plan does the job and it is not us.
One script worth training explicitly, because staff fail it on wording rather than on knowledge: can a restaurant refuse service gives the question to ask about an assistance animal and the order to ask it in.
Two door scripts worth training word for word rather than leaving to judgement: minors on licensed premises gives the New South Wales test of checking anyone who looks under 25, not under 18.
One piece of training that is not optional and has a legal deadline attached: the RSA certificate, which Queensland requires within 30 days of a new starter's first shift.
First aid is the training line most venues under buy. Restaurant first aid kit and first aider requirements covers the high risk ratio, the burn items a generic kit misses and how many people you actually need trained.
By putting the training inside shifts you are already paying for rather than scheduling it separately. Under the Restaurant Industry Award a casual has to be engaged for at least two consecutive hours, so four short separate sessions of 45 minutes each cost eight paid hours for three hours of content. The same three hours attached to the front of shifts the person was already rostered for costs three. The award makes fragmented training roughly 2.7 times more expensive than blocked training.
Work it from two hourly rates, because two people are on the clock. On the Fair Work pay guide from 1 July 2026 a casual food and beverage attendant grade 2 is A$33.85 an hour and a casual supervisor at Level 5 is A$39.13, so a shadowed hour is A$72.98. Ten hours of shadowing before the new person works a section alone is A$729.80 in wages. That is Skai Solutions' arithmetic from the published rates, not a published training benchmark.
Because of who walks in the door. ABS Job Mobility for the year to February 2026 shows accommodation and food services took on 198,900 people who were new entrants to employment against 81,800 who changed jobs from another employer. That is 2.43 new entrants for every job changer, the highest ratio of the 19 industry divisions. Construction is 0.69 and professional services 0.89. In most industries a new hire arrives knowing how to work. In hospitality most do not, and that is a structural fact about the intake rather than a failure of hiring.
There is no legal answer and no published benchmark for Australia or New Zealand, so anyone quoting a number is quoting an opinion. What is fixed is the shape of the constraint: the award's two hour casual minimum and three hour part time minimum set the smallest block you can pay for, and the gap between a trainee and a competent section runs in shifts rather than hours. Design the induction in whole shifts and you will be closer than any benchmark.
Sometimes, and the exception matters more than the rule. New Zealand has starting-out and training minimum wages of NZ$19.16 an hour against the adult NZ$23.95 from 1 April 2026. But Employment New Zealand states that if an employee supervises or trains other workers, those lower rates do not apply and they must be paid at least the adult minimum wage. Handing your cheapest experienced staff member the job of showing the new person around is the act that moves them up NZ$4.79 an hour.
Structurally, yes. New Zealand has no statutory minimum shift length, so a 45 minute training block can be paid as 45 minutes. Australia cannot do that under the Restaurant Industry Award, where the casual floor is two consecutive hours. A trans Tasman group running one induction plan across both countries is overpaying on one side or underdelivering on the other.
Then training is not your problem and more of it will not help. Look at the reason people are going first: roster stability, the gap between rostered and actual hours, and whether the people you kept are being classified and paid correctly. Fixing the induction on a venue with a revolving door just means running the same induction more often.