GLOBAL BARTENDER | Bartending School Training Certification

Every time in life you’ve had to learn something new, at first it probably felt harder than expected.

If you’ve ever gotten your driver’s license, think back to your first practical lessons and the struggle of coordinating the clutch, accelerator, and brake pedals together with the gear lever. But after practicing over and over, the process became almost automatic—and today you can drive a car while talking to someone next to you or even on the phone (though you shouldn’t do that)! 🙂

If you play a sport or have any hobby that requires learning, you’ll have noticed how, with time and practice, everything becomes easier. The path to becoming a professional behind the bar works exactly the same way.

Becoming a professional bartender or a skilled barista in coffee-making who is truly ready to work is anything but simple.

On the contrary, already during your very first class (whether live or online) of any of our professional courses, you’ll realize just how much you need to learn before you can confidently—and competently—handle a night behind the bar.

To gain real ease and confidence behind the counter, you have two options:

1. Start working right away, putting into practice “as best as you can” what you learned in class—while probably forgetting much of what you only saw, heard, or tried once;
2. Train and practice as much as possible, mastering cocktail recipes and practical skills, both at home, in class, and during internships.

That’s why MIXOLOGY Academy is truly an Academy: here, training is not limited to just a few hours, days, or weeks. Every student has the opportunity to refine techniques, practice, and retake the courses they attended for 12 months and beyond.

To make this possible, you’ll need a workstation dedicated exclusively to you whenever you’re attending live lessons or practicing at the Academy—perhaps simulating an order of 8 cocktails or more to serve in the shortest time possible—and you’ll also need SPACE.

Only during coffee practice will you need to rotate between different espresso machines with your classmates, but this is intentional: each Trainer can best follow a maximum of 2 students at a time—simply for visual reasons—while they prepare several coffees and cappuccinos in “coffee speed working,” meaning the simultaneous preparation of multiple daytime bar drinks.

Since the founding of MIXOLOGY Academy, we have focused our training on hands-on practice, and over time several schools have tried (unsuccessfully) to copy us by offering free course repeats to unsatisfied students.

The ACADEMIC YEAR is something entirely different: according to our teaching philosophy, you MUST practice even if you feel you’ve understood the entire program. Why? Because it’s one thing to perform well in class in front of your peers and instructors who have followed you from day one, and another to do so in a real workplace.

It takes a lot more practice than simply completing the program once, especially since everyone learns at a different pace. If it takes you 2 months to reach the level needed to work in a prestigious venue, your classmate might need 3—or 6! If you don’t train and test yourself, you’ll never know.

Think back to school: how long did it take you to learn an entire history chapter? Could you remember all the dates and names after just one reading, exactly as your teacher expected?

If the answer is yes, congratulations—you had an easier time at school than most of us. But for the majority, learning something new takes repeated effort, and going through a program just once, as in most traditional bartending schools, is NOT enough to really prepare you for work.

To become a bartender, you need to memorize countless recipes, techniques, and preparations, and be able to execute them on the spot—adjusting ingredients and steps as you go. When you’re making multiple cocktails at once as quickly as possible, you can imagine it’s NOT exactly simple or within everyone’s reach—unless you’ve trained extensively.

To make this kind of theoretical and practical learning easier, at MIXOLOGY Academy we developed and registered a method called Global Bartending, which enables our students to make the most of their training period and secure jobs worldwide.

For some time now, the Academic Year has also been integrated with an App (including exercises to practice from home) and a streaming platform that allows you to follow LEVEL UP, our continuous online training path for professional and personal growth.

Together with the Academic Year, you will also gain access to our Official App featuring exercises designed specifically for aspiring bartenders like you—such as Cocktail Memory (to study and review cocktail recipes in a dynamic way) and Speed Working (a timed simulation of real work orders). And the best part is that you can compare your training results with those of other Academy students!

The MIXOLOGY Academy Official App also gives you direct access to Bartender JOB job postings and to the pages where you can apply for courses and live Masterclasses. Plus, it allows you to enter Level UP, our on-demand video course platform—just like Netflix, except every episode you watch or listen to takes you one step further in your professional and personal growth.

The Global Bartending method is the scientific bar work system created and registered by MIXOLOGY Academy after years of study and the evolution of past methodologies, namely:

• the American Bar, developed in the 1980s and still taught today in traditional bartending schools, often combined with the acrobatic style known as Flair;
• the Classic Method, dating back to the 1950s and still studied today by students in hospitality schools and national bartending associations.

The Global Bartending method developed by MIXOLOGY Academy organizes the bartender’s workstation as well as every single movement to optimize the time needed to prepare one or more cocktails.

All of this is made possible thanks to a special algorithm we created—a truly scientific flow chart that enables bartenders to prepare multiple cocktails in the shortest possible time (without compromising the quality of the drinks).

To fully apply all the steps of this work system, it is essential to master both modern and traditional mixing techniques: the deeper this knowledge, the better the results the bar professional will achieve in any work environment.

The Global Bartender receives the most modern training possible thanks to the Global Bartending method, which makes them precise, fast, and extremely effective, providing far more job opportunities compared to other professionals in the field.

Furthermore, this professional develops a strong inclination to optimize resources and minimize waste, greatly facilitating the operations of the venue where they work and taking the first steps toward a managerial role in the Beverage sector.

MIXOLOGY Academy can proudly claim to be the only bartending academy—or rather, the only academies (with campuses in Rome and Milan)—each equipped with over 90 workstations divided across 5 classrooms, covering more than 600 square meters per facility. Every classroom features the most modern equipment, and each individual workstation for bartending courses is fully supplied with all the tools needed for the program. This means:

1. You will never have to share your workstation with anyone else during live training, allowing you to take full advantage of class hours, practice, and training sessions 12 months a year, in addition to all the online learning;
2. During the course, you won’t need to purchase any tools. On the contrary, we will provide you with a Bar Equipment Kit FREE OF CHARGE, which you can keep at home and use during online lessons and once you start working.

From the very first day we began training, we strongly believed in a teaching method where practice is an integral part of learning.

If you don’t try and repeat a new movement, a technique you’ve never seen before, or a recipe you hadn’t learned, your progress will be slow and full of gaps.

On the other hand, by practicing for as long as you need—well beyond the standard length of a program—you will truly make this profession your own in a “relatively short” time, even if you’re starting from zero. We say “relatively” because we are the first to encourage our students to take full advantage of the Academic Year they have available for as long as possible.

Whether it takes weeks, months, or years doesn’t matter: what really matters is that by the end of the learning period best suited to your pace, you are finally ready to start working as a true professional.

Some people tend to assume that, since our campuses are so large—in fact, the largest in Italy and in the world in the field of bartending education—our attention toward students might not be as strong as in smaller schools.

In reality, the opposite is true, because each National Campus of our Academy operates like a real company with procedures and quality standards that are constantly tested to ensure continuous improvement.

We have set a maximum of 12 students per Trainer in class, but our data shows that we almost never reach that limit despite the hundreds of students attending our courses every year. This is because we have many instructors who are not forced to work exhausting shifts in precarious conditions just to “keep things running.”

Working with us means balanced schedules, as we don’t want to overwork our Trainers or prevent them from giving their best when teaching in the classroom—on top of providing them with a salary well above the national average, not to mention the bonuses we regularly award to our entire staff.

Training with us, on the other hand, means being supported before, during, and after the course not only by enthusiastic, energetic Trainers—who also spend much of their time continuing their own education at our expense—but also by our administrative staff, each student’s Tutor, and the team at Bartender JOB, our job placement agency.

In the end-of-course evaluation forms, it’s no coincidence that the phrase most often associated with us by our students is that “we are like a second family”. But we invite you to come meet us in person to see it with your own eyes and put us to the test. 🙂

MANAGE YOUR CLASS ATTENDANCE BASED ON YOUR AVAILABILITY!

The Academy is open Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 15:00 to 23:00, and on Saturdays from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 15:00 to 19:00.

You can attend courses in the following schedules:

• Weekday Schedule = Monday to Friday in the morning (10:00 – 14:00), afternoon (15:00 – 19:00), or evening (19:00 – 23:00), with the possibility to switch time slots even after the course has started;
• Weekend Schedule = Saturdays from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 15:00 to 19:00;
• Super Intensive Schedule = 8 hours of classes per day, Monday to Friday (from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 15:00 to 19:00, or at other times to be arranged);
• Customized Schedule = in agreement with the Academic Office, you can personalize class days and times whenever the program of your chosen course and available spots allow it.

If you miss one or more lessons, depending on availability, you’ll be offered the chance to resume from where you left off, make up the lessons on another day/shift, or at most in the next course, which you can re-attend from the beginning at no extra cost within 12 months of enrollment.

Through our Internal field”BARTENDER JOB” we collect the CVs of the professionals we train in our Academy classrooms and present them to venues—both in Italy and abroad—looking for staff.

If you are opening a venue that serves food and beverages, you probably already know that, in order to obtain a bar license, you need to accumulate a certain number of points.

These points are linked to a series of documents that must be submitted to the local Municipality where your bar is located. The ideal professional to consult for this process is a specialized surveyor—or the architect/architecture firm you’ve hired for the renovation of the venue. However, here are some of the requirements you will need to obtain your new Food and Beverage Service License:

• SAB Course (formerly REC) on Food and Beverage Service, or alternatively you may appoint a “preposto” (responsible person) with the necessary credentials to substitute the course requirement through proven work experience in the sector (documented with work contracts of a certain duration);
• HACCP Course (organized through our partners in Rome and Milan) on hazard analysis and critical control points related to food and beverage service;
• Specialization courses in the sector;
• Various health and hygiene authorizations;
• Etc…

Regarding the item “specialization courses,” one of the ways to earn points is by presenting one or more certificates obtained after completing professional training courses in the sector.

In this respect, the professional specialization certificates issued by MIXOLOGY Academy allow you to obtain up to 10 points (the maximum allowed under the “specialization courses in the sector” category) for the achievement of a Food and Beverage Service License.

This professional program can be paid through the following options:

• Up to 12 monthly installments with Zero Interest using any Credit Card, Debit Card, or certain prepaid cards such as Poste Pay Evolution or Superflash card from Intesa San Paolo (available even for students and those without payslips or guarantors);
• Up to 36 convenient monthly installments with Zero Interest, with the first installment due 30 days after enrollment;
• Payment in a single solution.

Below you’ll find more details on the payment options for our professional courses:

• UP TO 12 MONTHLY INSTALLMENTS WITH ZERO INTEREST = up to 12 monthly installments (1 year) without interest using any Credit Card or Debit Card, or certain prepaid cards such as Poste Pay Evolution or the Superflash card from Intesa San Paolo.

This installment plan requires no approval from credit institutions, no payslip, and no guarantor: all you need is a valid ID and a Credit/Debit Card or certain prepaid cards like Poste Pay Evolution or Intesa San Paolo’s Superflash. To pay, it is enough to simply swipe your card on a POS terminal, just like a normal store transaction, with the only difference being that the amount will be spread over up to 12 installments with no extra interest.

Of course, your basic training will be completed long before the payment plan ends: this means that once you finish one of our professional courses, you can start working as a bartender or barista and pay the remaining installments with your own earnings. And we will help you FREE of charge to find a job through our partner job placement agency, Bartender JOB.

• UP TO 36 MONTHLY INSTALLMENTS WITH ZERO INTEREST = up to a maximum of 36 monthly installments with no interest

The number of months over which you can spread the payment of your chosen course is indicated on the respective “course page” on our official website corsiperbarman.it.

With this option as well, the cost of the bartending course can be spread over a long period, and according to our statistics, for several years now over 9 out of 10 of our students have found work within 3 months of completing a MIXOLOGY Academy professional course—long before they finish paying for it!

While all interest is fully covered by MIXOLOGY Academy, the only additional cost you’ll need to cover with this payment method is the stamp duty fee for opening the installment plan, which amounts to €16 in total.

You can request approval for the 36-installment plan and receive a response within a few hours: if approved and upon signing a course contract (for bartender, barista, bar manager, or other), payment of the 1st installment will be made by bank debit order (RID) 30 days after signing the contract.

Even students without a payslip can request the installment plan, as long as they have a bank or postal account—their own or that of a parent—and a guarantor with a payslip, who can be a parent, relative, or friend. To start the installment process, you only need a valid ID and your tax code.

• PAYMENT IN A SINGLE SOLUTION = you can pay the entire cost of the bartending / barista / bar business course in advance, in a single payment.

You can complete the payment in cash (within the limits allowed by law), with credit/debit/prepaid cards such as Poste Pay Evolution or Intesa San Paolo’s Superflash card, with a bank check, or via bank transfer.

As a welcome gift for completing your enrollment in the Global Bartender program, you will receive:

• 2 Bartender Bags with Equipment Kits (value €594) FREE
• WOW Welcome Box with a Professional Apron (value €100) and the BARMAN BASICS box set (value €157) FREE

Altogether, the gifts you’ll receive add up to a value of €898, but for you, we repeat, everything is free!

The 2 bags are different based on their contents: one includes a kit of cocktail-mixing tools (such as a shaker and metal pourer), while the second bag contains latte art cups, professional pens, and other essential tools for coffee-making.

The WOW BOX includes exclusive gadgets for our students, such as the “family ring” and a personalized work apron (worth €147 on its own).

Finally, in the Barman Basics box set you’ll find a video course available both via USB stick and streaming, along with books, a manual, a recipe book, and other extremely useful materials to help you dive deeper into this world.

When people start a training program that will allow them to begin working, they often have many doubts and concerns:

• Can I really trust this institution?
• Will I feel comfortable in that environment?
• Will I be able to understand what they teach me?
• Is this truly the best solution for me?

And most likely, the questions you are asking yourself right now are many more—and that’s completely normal.

Whenever we make an investment, especially when it concerns our future, we all want the best and we certainly don’t want to make the wrong choice.

The courses at MIXOLOGY Academy are NOT “study holidays” where you learn in a superficial and generic way how to prepare a few cocktails and cappuccinos. They are instead genuine professional courses aimed at job placement, even though our students love the teaching method we have developed and enjoy attending the lessons. So, if you are not looking for an amateur course, we are probably the right choice to help you.

All our professional courses have been designed specifically for people with no prior experience in the industry, while those already working as bartenders, baristas, or bar managers can further develop their expertise through the specialization courses offered by the Academy.

Since embarking on a professional growth path can still feel risky despite all the information you might have gathered, we have decided to apply a “100% Satisfaction or Your Money Back Guarantee” to all our courses:

If, after completing 20% of the course hours (or 20% of the first module of a professional program), you are not satisfied with our work—or simply realize that this is not the next step you want to take in your life—then, with no ifs or buts, we will refund your entire enrollment fee, and you may even keep the Course Manual.

As you can see, we are an Academy whose goal is to train professionals who achieve extraordinary results in this field. Therefore, if you are not sure you want to pursue such an ambitious project with us, it’s only fair that you stop right away and don’t spend a single euro just to give it a try.