Behind the arches: our writer takes a sneak peek into the training grounds of McDonald's franchisees: hamburger university

Entrepreneur,  Jan, 2006  by Geoff Williams

Tags: McDonald's Corp., training

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Indeed, earlier in the day, I was allowed to observe two classrooms from the translation booths, which are typically used by international visitors in the classroom. If needed, McDonald's has interpreters who can translate into 28 different languages, including Korean, Malay, Portuguese and Swedish.

In a class on business leadership, I set my sights on one of three tables in the room, where four men and one woman, in their 30s to early 50s, were having a heated discussion:

"This is another objective to support the goal."

"We're going to have two months? To complete all this?"

"I think he's saying that the amount of objects we have may not be achievable in three months. I'm just saying what his point is, and I think he's saying that we're biting off more than we can chew."

On several flip charts around them are various mandates. One is titled "Goals," with "to improve commitment survey results from 72 percent to 85 percent" written underneath. Another says "Sales," with the goal being "to increase comp sales by 5 percent." Later, the group changes the number to 8 percent, and then to 13 percent. The students get increasingly animated. Hamburger University professor Mark Collins says, "We've had people get very emotional in the classes. We've seen tears. We've run the gamut."

The objective of this particular weeklong business leadership class, says Hamburger University training manager Wanda Hunter, is for students "to understand the importance of having a business plan, what the components are and their accountability in keeping the business plan alive."

In this class, only one of the students is on the verge of opening a McDonald's--and that's Miomir Ivanovic. Many business professionals besides McDonald's franchisees seek to attend the famed university to improve their business or people skills. "We've had attorneys, engineers, college professors, high-school teachers, barbers and grocery store owners come through here," says Randy Vest, a senior director for U.S. Training, Learning & Development who's in charge of formulating Hamburger University's curriculum.

Ivanovic is in his second week of training at Hamburger University, and it is his final week before he graduates and receives his diploma. Two weeks of training sounds minimal, but that's simply the training received inside the university. To get to this point, Ivanovic had to navigate his way through a matrix of time-consuming steps, including the very first, where for three days he lived on the lowest rung of the McDonald's ladder, making french fries and mopping floors. Ivanovic has been immersed in training at a McDonald's in his home city of Philadelphia as well as at a regional center, which includes working in a kitchen lab that is identical to working behind the counter of an actual McDonald's. Those doing the training are "field fresh," meaning they have been working inside an actual McDonald's on some management level within the past two years or so, says Allison Sindelir, master trainer, who oversees Hamburger University's professors.