At some point it becomes obvious. Maybe a new hire’s first week was a complete mess, and it didn’t have to be. Maybe the same mistakes keep happening and nobody can explain why. Maybe you are about to open a second location and realize that everything you know about running the first one exists entirely inside your own head. However it happens, you arrive at the same conclusion: you need a training program.

And unfortunately, there is no training department at your company. No one to call and say, “Send me the works” and have a complete curriculum show up a week later. It is just you and a list of things that need to happen.

That was the starting point for a panel session at the 2026 National Restaurant Association Show called “Training Without a Training Department,” which was organized through CHART. The panelists were Corban Nichols of Piada Italian Street Food, Anna Mason of Edley’s Restaurant Group, Kim Evans of Hopdoddy Burger Bar, and me, Patrick Yearout of Ivar’s Restaurants. Between the four of us, we represented everything from a solo training function to a department of three.

Here are some of the lessons we learned along the way and can help you as well, whether you are starting from scratch, rebuilding something that has fallen apart, or just trying to make things a little more consistent than they were yesterday.

Define what “right” looks like

Before creating training materials, you need to determine exactly what you are trying to teach.

To provide an example, when I first joined Ivar’s back in 1999, I trained for six weeks at the Aurora Avenue quick-service restaurant before being transferred to the Edmonds location. On my first day at the destination store, I was assigned to do prep work, so I breaded the fish, cooked the chowder, and made up the salads and shrimp cocktails. A few minutes after I was done, the Assistant Manager started checking my work, and then I heard her exclaim from the back room: “Good God, where are the radishes?” She immediately brought up the pan full of salads I had made and asked me why I had not put any radishes on them.

Well, dear reader, in six weeks of training at Aurora, we had never once put a single radish on any salad, so this was news to me. The Assistant took me back to the prep table, put the knife in my hand, and “re-trained” me to do things the Edmonds way. And there I think you will see the problem I discovered: the two restaurants had completely different ideas about what the standard was supposed to be. And this was only the beginning…over time, as I traveled from store to store, I began keeping a notebook of inconsistencies and eventually collected close to 100 examples of the same task being done differently depending on the location or manager involved.

Eventually, when I was asked about starting a training program for the quick-service division, I pointed out that we had to answer a more basic question first: what did “right” actually look like? We needed to go through our operations and determine which tasks and processes needed standards (including not just how to make the food, but also how to serve, clean, open, close, and everything in between), and for those which we said yes, what those standards should be. Until those decisions were made, there was very little value in creating training materials because we would simply be promoting inconsistency.

Corban Nichols touched on a similar idea during our discussion when he observed that a standard employees cannot explain or locate when they need it is not much of a standard at all. When expectations are clearly defined, accessible, and understood across the organization, the work of training becomes far more straightforward.

Write it down

Once standards have been defined, the next step is documenting them. Kim Evans offered some of the most practical advice of the session when she encouraged operators to start with something as simple as a Microsoft Word document. The beauty of that suggestion lies in its accessibility because every organization can do it, even one without a training department. There is no software implementation, no lengthy approval process, and no budget request standing between the idea and the first step.

A Word document allows you to capture expectations, document procedures, and create consistency where none existed before, and more importantly, it creates momentum. When you begin writing things down, your teams can start identifying gaps, asking better questions, and discovering opportunities to improve.

The problem with you waiting for something bigger and better is that the perfect system is never going to arrive. There will always be another feature to evaluate, another platform to demo, another budget cycle to get through, or another priority competing for attention. Meanwhile, new employees continue showing up, managers continue answering the same questions, and valuable knowledge remains trapped inside the heads of the people who happen to be working today…and the same knowledge walks out the door when they leave.

Use the tools you already have

Anna Mason built on Kim’s suggestion of using Microsoft Word by mentioning other resources that hospitality companies already have access to through, many of which are free or typically come with existing software subscriptions. Although these tools were not necessarily designed for training, they can support onboarding, communication, and learning without requiring a major investment.

A QR code posted at a workstation, for example, can provide quick access to recipes and procedures. A Microsoft Form can gather feedback from new hires and identify areas where additional coaching may be needed. Shared folders can provide a central location for job aids, onboarding materials, and operating guides.

The larger lesson here from Anna was to remain curious. Most businesses accumulate systems, subscriptions, and applications over time, often for reasons unrelated to employee development. Before adding something new, you should spend a little time exploring whether an existing resource can accomplish the same objective because you may be surprised by what is already hiding in plain sight.

Focus on the critical few

When you begin building training for the first time, you may assume the challenge is creating enough content. More often, however, the challenge is deciding which content matters most.

Kim described how her team initially tried to prepare employees for every possible scenario they might encounter, only to discover that the sheer volume of information made the learning experience overwhelming rather than effective. Team members were being asked to absorb so much content that the most important lessons were getting lost in the process.

The obvious follow-up question is how to decide what belongs in training and what does not. Anna suggested starting with the role itself. What does an employee need to know before working independently? Which responsibilities have the greatest impact on performance? Which topics can wait until additional experience has been gained? Answering those questions helps separate essential knowledge from information that is merely nice to have.

That distinction can be especially valuable if your hotel or restaurant does not currently have a training program. Rather than attempting to build a comprehensive curriculum from the start, focus on the handful of skills and responsibilities that have the greatest impact on performance in the first few weeks after hiring. Additional knowledge can always be added later, but employees who master the fundamentals are far more likely to succeed than employees who receive a mountain of information and retain very little of it.

Keep it simple

If there was one theme that appeared repeatedly throughout the session, it was simplicity.

Anna suggested companies use “keep it simple, keep it visible, and keep it repeatable” as a mantra when first starting out because it will help provide a useful filter for evaluating almost any training tool. If employees cannot find it (especially on a busy shift), they will not use it. If they cannot understand it quickly, they will not use it. If it is too complicated to repeat consistently, it will eventually be abandoned.

I learned a similar lesson years ago from longtime CHART member John Kidwell at one of our conferences. I was showing him a job aid I had created (and very proud of), and after at least 5 minutes of walking though the instructions, John stopped me in the middle of a sentence and told me I needed to start over. He was emphatic that if I needed to conduct a training session on how to use the job aid, then the job aid itself was failing. I wanted to get mad that he was sh***ing all over my masterpiece, but he was 100% correct: I had somehow managed to create a job aid that needed a user manual.

That advice has stayed with me because it applies to far more than job aids. Checklists, training guides, onboarding materials, and operational procedures all benefit from the same discipline. Before adding another page, another explanation, or another exception, ask yourself whether the addition makes the resource more useful or simply more complicated. In many cases, the most effective training materials are not the most comprehensive. They are the ones employees can understand and apply without needing someone standing beside them to explain how they work.

Build training with operators, not for them

Throughout the discussion, Corban Nichols repeatedly brought the conversation back to a simple question: what will actually work in the field?

That question is worth asking because training often looks very different in a corporate office than it does during a lunch rush. A process that seems perfectly logical on paper may fall apart when a manager is juggling three priorities, a key employee calls out sick, or a new hire is trying to keep up with a busy shift. Operators live in that reality every day, which gives them a perspective that no amount of brainstorming can replace.

When building training, team members and managers should be helping to identify problems, review solutions, test resources, and provide feedback before anything is finalized. Their involvement almost always improves the finished product because they see obstacles, opportunities, and unintended consequences that would never occur to an owner typing at a computer while sitting on a big comfy chair in a climate-controlled environment. Additionally, involving those in the field will create a sense of ownership that makes implementation easier later on because employees are far more likely to support something they helped shape than something that was handed to them from above.

Don’t build it alone

One of the biggest misconceptions about training is that every company needs to invent its own solutions, but that is thankfully not true because of organizations such as CHART.

When asked about the value of the association, the panelists described different versions of the same experience. Anna talked about discovering a community while building learning programs with limited resources, Kim emphasized the importance of having trusted peers she can call when new challenges arise, and Corban reflected on the value of being surrounded by professionals who challenge one another’s thinking and openly share what they have learned.

That support matters because most training issues are not unique – someone out there has already wrestled with the onboarding problem you are facing. Someone has already built the manager development program you wish you had. And someone has already tested an idea that succeeded (or failed) and can help you avoid making the same mistakes.

For professionals working without a training department, that may be the most valuable resource CHART provides. It offers access to members who have faced many of the same obstacles and are willing to help others navigate them. Building training will always require effort, but it becomes much easier when you have a community of experienced practitioners learning alongside you.

Getting started

One of the encouraging themes from the panel was that none of these recommendations require a training department to exist before the work can begin. In fact, many training departments are built because someone like you took the time to define a standard, document a process, create a job aid, or solve a recurring operational problem.

That reality is easy to forget when looking at organizations with established learning teams, sophisticated systems, and extensive training libraries. What often appears to be a fully developed training function is usually the result of years of incremental improvements made by people who started with far fewer resources than they have today.

If your organization does not currently have a training department, the goal is not to build one overnight. The goal is to identify the next opportunity to improve how employees learn, perform, and succeed. Do that often enough, and you may eventually discover that what began as a collection of small training efforts has evolved into something much larger.