Learning for Life: champion cocktails, championing skills and inclusion

Bianca Lima's cocktail and bartending expertise has taken her to the top – in 2020 she was declared champion of the World Class Competition, Brazil for her competition entry channelling Brazilian folklore.

Bianca is now a head bartender and consultant. And she is a graduate of (and ambassador for) one of our longest-running, most successful skills programmes: Learning for Life.

Leading the way on our ambition to build skills

Learning for Life provides tools, training and skills in key areas related to our industry and value chain including hospitality, entrepreneurship and bartending.  The programme matches high-potential individuals with vacancies in the industry and works to reduce the gap between people’s skills and the competencies required by employers. It is our flagship programme and will help lead us on the way to our Society 2030: Spirit of Progress ambition to champion inclusion and diversity throughout our value chain by providing business and hospitality skills to 200,000 people.

Learning for Life began in Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) in 2008, continues to thrive across the region, but the programme is also used as blueprint for other regions delivering hospitality and business skills training programmes across the world.

Creating opportunity across Latin America and the Caribbean

As the Covid-19 pandemic meant a reduction in face-to-face training, we accelerated the virtual and online components of Learning for Life across LAC. In Venezuela, we developed a virtual classroom format, working with the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Funindes, to deliver a Merchandising and Gastronomic Digital Marketing programme which contained modules in subjects including human rights, inclusion and diversity, positive drinking, employability, the Diageo Way of Selling, and brand passion. This year, 46 women and 34 men graduated from the programme in Venezuela.

In the Dominican Republic, where nearly 7,000 students have graduated from Learning for Life since 2010, we had 129 graduates this year, 70% of whom are women.

Across LAC as a whole, this year 2,580 people graduated from hospitality and business training programmes, with the new skills they need to succeed – showing that the programme continues to create opportunity in the region where it all began.