On a freezing winter morning, students hunch their shoulders against the fog, books clutched to their chest, and hurry over a bridge that arches between their halls and their first lectures. Geese, in less of a rush, skate on the icy surface of the lake below and shiver off into the undergrowth of the 80-acre campus.
But this is not an Oxbridge college. This is Hamburger University, Oak Brook, Illinois: McDonald's global centre for training. And the highest accolade to which these students aspire is the coveted “Degree in Hamburgerology”.
Inside, full-scale models of drive-through restaurants are circumnavigated by galleries on which staff take notes on the students scuttling below. Seventeen different national flags are raised in the main hall, and a small museum stretches its length, enshrining pieces of McDonald's history, including the battered piano that the founder Ray Kroc, a high-school dropout and former travelling milkshake salesman, played to relieve stress.
Hamburger University (HU) was founded by his first grillman, Fred Turner, in 1961. “Education was very much part of our founder's philosophy - being the best means training our employers to the very highest standard,” says Victor Arciniega, director of global training development, from behind his desk on campus. “HU is a physical manifestation of that...a very clear vision of where they wanted to take McDonald's as it grew...to ensure consistency throughout, as our first franchisees began to emerge.”
Almost 50 years later, Arciniega estimates that 1.5 million people around the world are trained by McDonald's each year, through seven Hamburger Universities around the globe. One is in London and over the past few years, McDonald's UK has been working with the state-sponsored Sector Skills Council to turn these in-house training schemes into nationally accredited qualifications.
As a result, 9,000 chosen employees (of its 72,000) will get GCSE or A-level equivalent qualifications through McDonald's this year: 6,000 through the GCSE-level apprenticeship scheme championed by Gordon Brown last week and another 3,000 through the “Shift Management Course” announced last September and better known by its moniker, the McA-level. The improvements made are shiny and impressive. An employee website gives free online tutorials in GCSE numeracy and English, students take modules from health-and-safety to staff management. All of which is calculated to sound a world away from the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a “McJob”: “An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects.”
You don't have to look far for people who share the distaste for McDonald's recipe for employee care. “For me, the way McDonald's treated their young workers was the gateway into the anti-McDonald's campaign,” says Dave Morris, the former postman-turned-hero of the anti-corporate movement when he defended himself against McDonald's in “McLibel”, one of the longest-running battle in English legal history, over the content of a pamphlet he had been distributing.
Encouraging kids to get fast-food qualifications along with their burger and fries is tantamount to telling the poor or underachieving not to bother with ambition, he says at his London home. “Why invite a corporation geared entirely towards profit into the public services and grant them even more access to young people?”
McDonald's challenges both the OED and Morris's position. Jez Langhorn, Head of Talent and Education, says McLibel was more than ten years ago. “I think it's safe to say that the world has changed and McDonald's has progressed with it. The Financial Times has listed us in its Top 50 great places to work for two years.”
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority agrees. “We're not telling anyone that going to McDonald's is a substitute for school,” Samina Khan says. “This is about more practical, on-the-job training - one that doesn't register anywhere on the education programme. Vocational training has a key part to play in a competitive economy. It's about plugging gaps in our national skill requirements.”
In a McDonald's perched on the motorway near Milton Keynes, nine grown-up “Shift Management” students are squeezed into primary-coloured, kid-size chairs. Between them, on a table of playhouse proportions, sit four cartons, McDonald's fries spilling out. One lifts a fry gingerly and holds it up to the light. “Limp,” she says with disdain. Another chews thoughtfully: “It doesn't have the crispiness of the first one... ooo... it's hard to explain, it's kind of soft and nondescript.” Fries are McDonald's' most ordered product. Fries equal profit and to protect them, there are rules.
Rules, as the trainer Tom Bacon explains to these students in the heat of the kitchen, for length, width and surface area of potato chip, which translate into rules for the height of stacking, temperature at removal, manner of carrying across kitchen, height at which to shake the salt and with which gesture. A complex litany that this group must learn if they are to take the first step from crew member to the managerial ranks and get their Government-endorsed qualification.
“It's not about rocket science all the time,” enthuses Andy Bates before another class of McDonald's students. They have gathered, on a sunny morning, inside a vast brick bunker in suburban East Finchley, the unlikely setting for Europe's own Hamburger University.
“It's about the basics: smiling and introducing yourself.” He locates the button for the sophisticated overhead projection system and music begins to blare out: “From the rooftops shout it out, Baby I'm ready to go!” Around him, the class is practising body language. “Look the customer in the eye when you're talking to him or her,” Bates says, “but don't stare: that can be mistaken as intimidating.” There are roleplays: how to interact with disabled customers, blind customers, aggressive customers, children (Robbie Williams's “Doing it for the Kids” urging the students along). Cleanliness, friendliness, accuracy and attitude are stressed. Teenage boys freeze in awkwardness, their eyes darting uneasily to the white-board for direction.
“My dream is to start my own business, hopefully in cars,” confides a slight 19-year-old named Yasar. “My experience here will be vital, I think. McDonald's helps me a lot with monitoring and planning, it helps me motivate myself a lot 'cos I know I have to come in on time, I have to sort everything out, I have to make sure everyone's happy because I'm a crew trainer so that's quite a big job, innit?”
Does it compare with the college classes a few are still attending? “Not really. College-wise you've got a lot more theory work, exams, writing. But practically, McDonald's is very hard, I think. Here you improve your communication skills, so you can communicate better elsewhere too.”
In McDonald's on The Strand, Central London, employees greet the first hordes of the day. Breakfast preparation is in full swing. Lines of bagels, McMuffin sandwiches and waffles roll past in various stages of assembly to a relentlessly upbeat jazz soundtrack.
The manager Sharad Kanwar's gaze is fixed on one worker, Kizirul Islam, 27. “Today is an important moment in his career,” he says, clipboard in hand. “It's the day he'll hopefully be signed off as a shift manager. I really want him to do well. We'll see.” Islam must manage a shift with Kanwar watching his every move for mistakes. Preparation started the night before. Juggling records of historic takings with current Happy Meal toys, pop-star promotions or freak sunny spells, and running them in his mind through the McDonald's matrix, (decreeing that wages should amount to a specific percentage of takings), he has set today's financial target and the number of crew on the shift.
He will find out fast if he has set that target too low. With too few crew, backlogs and queues could quickly spiral into a customer or staff mutiny. A terrifying prospect in one of the busiest McDonald's in the country.
By midday, he is responsible for a staggering number of processes. Juggling figures turns to balancing acts with stock, staff and lunchbreaks, but there are systems to guide him and to safeguard everything - from handwashing to stocktaking. There is even a prescribed walking route that managers worldwide must commit to memory for microscopic cleanliness checks. Kanwar checks to see what Islam has missed. Out on the pavement, bird poo decorating the letter “D” provokes minor irritation.
“Every detail is dictated from the top,” says Brian (not his real name), a McDonald's employee until 2003 and founder of the McDonald's Worker Resistance, a secret cell of rebellion among staff in his local Glasgow restaurant, which grew into a global network of McDonald's workers promoting protests, advertising rights and printing a foul-mouthed magazine.
“In my view, apart from anything else, that makes them an extraordinary choice as an educator. Education - real education - should be open to the exchange of arguments and ideas...but there is no need to think when everything is dictated to you.”
Kizirul Islam disagrees. “The skills are transferable. Take what you learn about managing and motivating staff -you could take that to managing a supermarket. I get infuriated now when I see queues at Sainsbury's.”
In Northampton, Amanda Parcell, 32, is fiercely supportive. “Just because you've got GCSEs, it doesn't mean that when you get behind a desk or in a job like this that you're going to have a clue what you're talking about. So what difference does it make what grade you got? They don't teach you the real world - the one outside them four walls - in a classroom.”
She is also testament that teenagers don't have a monopoly on the courses. Living at home with her mother, her sister and her own eight-year-old son, she gets up at 6am, takes her son to school for 8.45am, heads to work and finishes her shift at 2.30pm in time to pick up her child. “It is time consuming. There's a lot to learn in such a short period. But I used to sit there in the evenings helping my son do his homework. Now we do it together. I'll be like ‘If you read that book, I'll read mine'. Then he's to bed at 8pm, and I'll stay up until midnight studying.”
She meets her business manager once a week. “He'll ask, ‘How's it going? Is there anything I can do to help?' He says if it gets too much, or I need longer to do bits of the course because I've got so much on, then I can take a break. I couldn't do that in a usual course, could I?”
Back on The Strand, Kizirul Islam is congratulated warmly by Sharad Kanwar. He has trounced his financial targets. He could have used another person on fries to bring down queues, but overall he has scored 95 per cent. “An excellent score,” Kanwar beams. Now the only thing in Islam's way is the written exam.
Two weeks later, on a shopping strip in Woking, a dozen or so young McDonald's staff pace up and down, puffing on cigarettes. Above them glow the golden arches and, above those, behind plastic blinds, 25 desks are arranged in rows, an exam paper lying on each. Each contains 200 highly specific multiple-choice questions. For example, Question: A large portion of fries should weigh? Answer: 160g.
Cigarettes are disposed of and the students file in. At the front, smiling and greeting students, is the dark-suited invigilator, Jamie Catling. The ticking of the clock behind him is amplified by the room's silence.
“Congratulations for getting this far,” Catling says. “This is the culmination of all the hard work you've been putting in and, hopefully, the revision you've been doing. The exam will last two hours. Good luck. The time starts...NOW.”
