Last summer, a few months after he became the first graduate from the University of South Florida's School of Hotel and Restaurant Management, Josh Shear, 23, was working as assistant manager at the Old Salty Dog on City Island. While he was busy disassembling the dock at the waterfront restaurant in preparation for a potential hurricane, a waitress ran outside with the news that a customer at the bar had a nosebleed and was now in the men's room. Shear left the dock to check on the customer and discovered it was far more serious. "Blood was pouring from his nose," he remembers. He quickly called 911, when another waitress ran up to tell him that one of the workers had fallen through the dock and was hanging by his arms.

"It was one of those crazy 15 minutes of life," Shear says.

But Shear says his training at USF's hospitality school helped him remain calm and follow the appropriate steps to keep everyone safe. "The training gave me perspective, because I knew what to do," he says. The restaurant business is all about mini-challenges and time management. "A pipe breaks in the kitchen, a waitress calls to say she can't come in, then half an hour into lunch you run out of something. When I first started in the kitchen I'd panic over the smallest thing. Training helps you see the big picture."

Local restaurants and hotels are desperate for more trained hospitality managers like Shear. With almost 913,000 employees, the hospitality industry is the largest employer in the state of Florida-not surprising, since the state is the world's top travel destination. State officials place hospitality's economic impact at $57 billion, accounting for 20 percent of Florida's economy and generating a whopping $3.4 billion in state taxes. Virginia Haley, the executive director of the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau, says there are 783 lodging and food service businesses in Sarasota, with a total of 15,642 employees and 15,000 lodging units. In Manatee there are 527 businesses with 9,633 employees.

James McManemon Jr., general manager at The Ritz-Carlton, Sarasota, says the dilemma in this region is not too few jobs, it's too few qualified applicants. "We would all hire more managers if there were more available to work," he says. "We have 650 employees [at the Ritz], and 50 to 75 are managers." It's expensive to recruit and relocate managers from other areas, and McManemon has the added pressure of training employees for other Ritz-Carltons. "We're a five-diamond hotel that trains other managers. We're a breeding ground."

In response to the growing challenge, a group of local hospitality pros including McManemon, consultant Judi Gallagher, The Colony Beach & Tennis Resort's Katie Klauber Moulton and consultant Linda Novey-White, who has since passed away, banded together a few years ago to create a university program to train hotel and restaurant managers. Their target was the hometown "U"-the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.

"The vision was to have a reputable school in Southwest Florida that would help keep well-educated professionals here," says Gallagher, who graduated from the Culinary Arts School at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., and is now on the school's advisory board. "That's been the toughest thing for this area. People move away."

After some discussion about incorporating it into the business school at USF in Tampa, the decision was made to create a separate school for hospitality management and base it at the Sarasota-Manatee campus. It is the first USF school to be developed away from the main Tampa campus and the first hospitality school on the west coast of Florida-students can graduate with a bachelor's of science degree in hospitality management or with a certificate in either restaurant or hotel management.

"This program was set up because the people in the industry in this area desired an educated work force," says Jay Schrock, the school's founding director. Schrock holds degrees from Oklahoma State University and Kansas State University and a Ph.D. from Texas Tech. He was a particularly appealing candidate because he was a former hotel manager and instrumental in the founding of the hospitality-management programs at Texas Tech and San Francisco State University.

In the two and a half years since the school opened at USF, only five students have graduated with a B.S. in hospitality management, and two have received certificates-hardly enough to satisfy local needs, which are conservatively estimated to be 30 to 40 B.S. grads a year. But the program has grown from its inaugural class of 12 students to its current enrollment of 100. "We're running to keep up," says Schrock. Administrators plan for the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management eventually to have its own building on USF's new Crosley campus, set to open this fall.