Tips For Training Your Baristas

If you own or manage a coffee shop, then part of your job will likely be to hire and train baristas. With any luck, you can hire people who already have some barista experience. Then, your training can focus on honing their skills and developing the specific skills they need in your coffee shop. Here are some tips to help ensure your barista training is effective, straightforward, and thorough.

Let them observe first.

Before you start teaching the barista anything, let them take some time and observe the other workers. Even if you can only let them do this for an hour, it will give them a chance to get some background knowledge of the process, where certain items are located, how the team interacts, how customers are treated, and so forth. In their head, they may start formulating some questions to ask when you later address certain parts of the job in training.

Have them make drinks while you observe.

Especially if this is someone with some former experience, you don't just want to have them watch while you're training them. Instead, show them how to make a drink — then have them repeat it. Once they have made enough drinks in front of you that you're confident they know the basic processes, you can have them start making actual customer orders with you alongside them to give verbal instructions and guidance as needed.

Leave any food or side work training until later.

For the first few days, let your training focus on the coffee. If your baristas are expected to do other tasks, like prepare some foods or perform side work at the end of their shift, leave those things for later. Those tend to be skills anyone can pick up. You don't want the new barista to get too focused on those details when they are just learning recipes and coffee processes. Once the coffee processes are more familiar to them, you can introduce training on other tasks, and they'll be better able to focus on it. You can have them work on simple tasks, like wiping tables, from the get-go — but hold off on more involved work that requires skill and learning.

If you follow the tips above, you should have better luck training your baristas. A well-trained barista is a happy barista, and happy baristas will keep your customers coming back again and again.

Contact a company like Gravity Coffee Company to learn more. 

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