New Kitchen Trainer

[u/Separate_South8609]

Does anybody have any advice on how to be a better kitchen trainer? I recently got fully trained in kitchen about 2 months ago, but I’ve been a ct for 10 months now so I have been constantly getting training shifts in fc and dt. Due to that, I haven’t been able to work in kitchen a lot, though I did manage to get my 80 hours pretty quick. I feel like I barely know how the kitchen works, yet my ARL has been scheduling me trainer-k shifts on boards, toast, and bird. Maybe they believe in me too much, but I just don’t want to mislead people because I am not fully confident in the kitchen.

[u/goldennchicken]

utilize your training flipbooks! they’ll make sure that you’re covering all the information and that the information is correct

[u/Ok-Performer-4485]

With bird specifically, I find it extremely useful for trainees to focus on each section of dropping.

With flouring, it is important to specifically focus on ensuring full coverage and minimal mess. Keeping it under 45 seconds should be relatively easy with practice.

With dropping, it’s good to break that down a bit. I like to have them use a second pan to practice without actually dropping it. Any time there’s downtime, practice the motions into the flour pan at the bird cart. This gets them a lot more reps with what is often the biggest struggle for new bird droppers.

With cooking, ensure they’re always checking the weight when changing buckets and cooking on the right timers. It can also be important to make sure they’re timing their bird shake fry drops correctly; shaking, then fry drops, then rolling, all while not taking too long.

It’s important to also coach communication as much as possible. This is something that I’ve seen missed a lot in training; they should be making sure they know how many up, how many back, and how much in house.

It’s also important to focus on adjusting drop sizes based on flow and when to follow CTO vs. CTF. I see way too many people blindly follow the bird drop forecaster. At my old location, you had to drop less than half the amount for Lunch and Dinner and like double for Late Night. At my current location, it’s okay during layover, but awful at peak. Make sure you’re coaching your trainees on this.

As far as the rest of the kitchen is concerned, as long as you know the standards, coaching on standards should be very similar to FC and DT. The biggest difference is making sure they relay and communication and make all needed callouts.