When you’re considering a switch to the field of bartending, the most essential benefit the right training program can provide may be just that, a quick boost to your self-belief. “As a job-changer who had a full career in another field before deciding to learn bartending, the single most important thing Crescent gave me was the confidence to put myself forth as a barback or bar apprentice after completing the program—that I had the right to step up and be there,” says Xania V. Woodman, a corporate mixologist and the lead bartender at Alpine Distilling & Alpine Pie Bar in Park City, Utah.
A common thread is that for many successful bartending school graduates, the chief benefit received wasn’t about the drink making at all. “Luckily for me I was able to use the fact that I went to bartending school and that I had outstanding work ethic to help me land a service bartender position on the weekends, and the rest is history,” says David Leon Jr. After attending ABC Bartending School in Tampa, Florida, he’s been bartending since the age of 19, currently working for the Fifty/50 Restaurant Group in Chicago and its concepts including Portsmith, Leviathan, and Apogee.