Two dozen staff from the world’s largest hamburger chain are huddled in groups in an airy classroom on the 20th floor of a Shanghai tower block.
A sharp-suited ‘professor’ has them poring over thick files of data and a lively debate is under way.
The topic under discussion isn’t Ronald McDonald’s seven steps to a better burger, but self-help guru Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And the students are not waitresses and waiters, but restaurant managers and office workers from the chain’s rapidly expanding China business.
Welcome to HU, or Hamburger University, where only the cream of the McCrop are admitted for career training.
Since the university opened last year, two floors up from McDonald’s China headquarters, competition for places has been fierce. Indeed, the number of applicants from restaurant managers to senior directors, has been so high that HU is currently harder to get into than Harvard.
Just one to three employees out of every 100 who apply make the cut. At Harvard the odds are a little better with a 7 per cent acceptance rate. But there’s no memorial hall or Harvard yard at HU.
Successful applicants who pass a pre-screening interview and exam are instead greeted by a life-size statue of Ronald McDonald, rows of classrooms in corporate grey and thick folders bursting with paperwork.
A one-room library is crammed with inspirational management handbooks. There is also, ominously, a set of weighing scales. There is no cafeteria.
The highlight of a tour of the facilities is a corridor display of McDonald’s memorabilia from the 1950s and 60s, including grill scrapers, burger flippers and milk shake mixers, presumably designed to give the Chinese recruits a sense of the group’s heritage.
The university is a key plank in McDonald’s plans for rapid expansion on the mainland as it races to catch up with larger US rival in China, Yum Brands, which owns KFC and is opening new restaurants at a rate of more than one a day.
It has taken McDonald’s 20 years to get to 1,000 restaurants in China, but it expects to take only four years to get to 2,000 sites – its target for 2013.
This year alone it will open up to 200 new restaurants, half of them with drive-through windows to cater to China’s new car owners, each requiring at least six management staff and up to 45 crew (hostesses, cleaners etc).
‘We want to grow from within and we don’t want to get caught up in a salary war,’ a McDonald’s spokesman explained.
The HU training centre, one of seven around the world, was moved from Hong Kong last year after China became McDonald’s fastest-growing market in terms of new restaurant openings.
More than 1,500 McDonald’s staff out of more than 60,000 on the mainland, will undergo training courses which range from a few days for the top executives to several months for younger staff, this year. For the best candidates, the outcome will be promotion and a pay rise.
Sun Ying, 27, who started out earning 50p an hour as a hostess in a Shanghai McDonald’s in 2004, said: ‘I’ve been a store manager for a year and I’m up for another promotion. To move to the next level, I have to undergo training. My aim is to be an operations consultant [running a group of restaurants] before I am 30.’
If Sun Ying does well in the training course, which is paid for by the company, she adds that she can expect a significant boost to her pay.
‘My basic monthly salary of £470 plus bonus and incentives could double if I can lead my team at the restaurant to do well. But I want to climb the corporate ladder as well. Me and four of my classmates in Shanghai were promoted after finishing the first stage of HU training and now I have come back to do a second stage. The training has shown me how much competition I face to win a promotion but it has also given me confidence,’ she added.
McDonald’s, which in the West has long battled against the view that all its jobs are relatively low-skilled ones, popularly referred to as ‘McJobs’, has no such image problem in China.
In a country where graduate employment was running at more than 26 per cent towards the end of last year, landing a job with career prospects is a tough and highly competitive business.
‘Working in an international organisation is seen as a big opportunity. Applicants to HU say they really value the vocational training and skills they learn with us. These are things they aren’t taught at university,’ the McDonald’s spokesman said.
Ambitious recruits can also take inspiration from the top. McDonald’s chief executive, Jim Skinner, who earned USD $9.7million last year, started out as a management trainee in 1971.
As for the outlook in China, by the time Sun Ying and her peers reach the age of 30, the country’s food service industry is forecast to have grown from roughly £187billion to £280billion in 2014 – statistics which place her and her fellow students at HU firmly in the right place, at the right time, in a growing economy.
Source: Tessa Thorniley, DailyMail.co.uk, Wednesday 4th May 2011
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