Innovating Education: News Ideas to Host Training & Connect Students

For Karla Lopez-Martinez, co-founder of Beauty Backbone and co-owner of Gila Rut Salons in San Diego, education looks different right now. As part of our Burning Questions feature in the November issue of SALON TODAY, she provides fresh ideas to reimagine training online and in-person spaces.

SALON TODAY: With the COVID restrictions, how are you hosting education?

Lopez-Martinez: As we returned from the past two COVID shutdowns here in California, one area that we had to pause was our education program. We typically have ongoing weekly education for our new hires on Mondays. We decided to focus our efforts on servicing the rush of clients, getting used to all the extra sanitation/disinfecting procedures we put in place and re-building our business. It was painful to have to put our education on hold, but with the capacity restrictions given to us by state board we needed to get creative and strategize a new way to continue our program. We have successfully relaunched our program and it is working great! We restructured it into a few elements…

We are doing a weekly Facebook live “Sunday briefing” with our entire team where we celebrate successes of the previous week and share any new things coming up the following week, such as new product launches, COVID protocol updates and marketing efforts to re-build our business. We use this time as a moment to connect and motivate our team!  

We have incorporated more online training (via Zoom) for the parts of education that would normally be theory, such as culture, benchmarking, product knowledge, etc.

Now that we have installed dividers between each station, we are able to come back in to the salon for the hands-on portion of our education. 

We have found that our students are highly engaged and so appreciative of being able to continue their growth path. On the day of education (Monday) we schedule education opposite to salon hours so that we are not crowding the space. We are staggering the lessons to allow for smaller groups and so we can properly social distance everywhere possible. Our education schedule looks like this, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. color education; 2:30 p.m. – 8 p.m. cutting education.