Trained, certified, and properly placed — into the restaurants, hotels, caterers, and venues of Southern California, just as the region enters the biggest hospitality hiring wave in its history.
Most restaurants lose the majority of their staff inside a year, and it costs thousands of dollars every time. Ask anyone who left and you'll hear the same two things: nobody trained me, and there was nowhere to go.
That's a training problem wearing a turnover costume. We fix the first part by teaching properly, and the second part by showing you the ladder before you take the first step — right as Southern California heads into a run of world events nobody has enough staff for.
Trained people stay. Untrained people churn.
Hospitality turnover has averaged roughly 80% over the past decade, and replacing a single hourly employee costs $3,500–$6,000. Training and advancement are proven retention levers — good for workers, and good business for the operators who employ them.
Program Tracks
From first certification to shift leader
New to the industry
Hospitality Foundations
A 4–8 week pre-employment program that gets you certified, confident, and placed.
California Food Handler Card
Responsible Beverage Service (RBS) certification
ServSafe fundamentals
Guest service, kitchen & front-of-house labs
Placement support on completion
Working & advancing
Craft & Service Advancement
Skill tracks for hospitality professionals ready for the next station — or the next title.
Line cook and culinary skills
Bartending & mixology
Banquet, events & barista tracks
ServSafe Manager certification
Shift-lead & supervisor readiness
Employer partners
Employer Partner Training
Contracted short courses delivered for restaurant groups, hotels, caterers, and venues.
Mandated compliance training, handled
Team service standards and onboarding
Supervisor development for promotion from within
CA Food HandlerRBS CertificationServSafe & ServSafe ManagerFood Protection Manager
Compliance Training
California requires it. We deliver it.
California law makes key hospitality credentials mandatory — and puts the cost of training on employers. The Academy delivers these required courses as a service to operator partners, keeping their teams certified and their businesses compliant.
Food Handler Card
Required for food employees within 30 days of hire — and since 2024, employers must cover the training time and cost. We make it turnkey.
Responsible Beverage Service
Mandatory statewide for alcohol servers and their managers, with certification required within 60 days of employment.
Food Protection Manager
Nationally accredited manager-level food safety certification, required for supervisory roles and renewed every five years.
Every one of these expires. That's not a nuisance — it's the whole point.
Most people let one lapse, scramble on a Thursday, and buy the cheapest thing that will issue a certificate by Friday. Then they do it again three years later, with a different company, and end up with no record of any of it.
We'd rather be the standing appointment. Take the class live online in an evening, keep it in the same record as everything else you've earned with us, and get a reminder before it lapses instead of after.
A certificate in a drawer is not a career. A record that follows you for twenty years is.
The Job Above You
The manager's job is changing. That's why we teach it.
Scheduling, ordering, inventory, onboarding — a lot of the paperwork that used to fill a manager's day is getting automated. What's left is the part that was always the actual job: reading a room, running a service, keeping a crew together on a bad night.
Our supervisor track teaches both. The systems, because that's what you'll be handed on day one. And the judgment, because that's what makes you worth promoting. Here's exactly what that covers.
Logs, temps, and par levels captured where the work happens.
Veterans & Transitioning Service Members
Military kitchens are production kitchens
Army 92G culinary specialists, Navy Culinary Specialists, and Marine Corps 3381s have cooked at volume, on schedule, to a standard, under pressure. The civilian certification ladder was built to recognize exactly that.
Cook
Credentials that match what you already did
The civilian ladder runs from food safety certification through the professional chef certifications — and it is designed around demonstrated production experience, which is the one thing military food service gives you in quantity.
Teach
Or train the next kitchen
There is a dedicated civilian credential for culinary instructors, and it sits directly on the military culinary career map. If you ran a galley or a mess and brought junior personnel along, that is an instructor track, not a starting-over track.
