Education is important to today’s salon professionals. When asked about how important it is they rank it in the top 5 reasons why they would choose (or not choose) a salon to work in.
Interestingly enough this preference for education does not just belong to incoming talent that is finishing school, but also lives with experienced talent.
What a wonderful reality this is for all of us in the professional beauty industry- our people love to keep growing!
When we continue to follow the data points around education things start to get little murky sometimes for salons who may feel like they aren’t offering what stylists want. When we ask new stylists who are just finishing school about their training preferences they tell us that they don’t want to be in a training program that is longer than one year.
If you are a salon with a rigorous training program you might find yourself feeling a bit defensive about your program.
I speak with salon owners all the time who have 1 year and even up to 2 years of training requirements before a stylist is really ready to be full time behind the chair and they defend it with logic- “they can’t possibly be ready before then.”
Other salons have the opposite challenge of not having a structured program and feeling less than because of it. I speak with many owners who feel like their lack of structure and training makes them less appealing.
The truth is there is talent out there that wants both of these opportunities and your opportunity as a salon is to help talent know which of the lanes you fall into. Or maybe you are somewhere in the middle.
You’ll lose if you stay in defense mode about your situation.
Instead I want to invite you to make a list of all the positive reasons you do it the way you do it. To count as positive you need to put on the lens of a stylist and say “why is this valuable to them?”
Once you have your answers start talking about and showing your training on Instagram. Talk about it in the schools. Tag your stylists and the schools when you have education and have created a reel to showcase it. Be proud of the value you bring and share it!
This will enable you to stop defending yourself and to start attracting talent who wants what you have to offer.
