All You Should Know About Becoming a Chef by Josh Stone

Many people seriously underestimate and trivialise the level of effort, commitment and hard work that is required in order to succeed as a professional chef. Be under no illusions about it, being a chef is an extremely stressful job indeed and one that will try the patience of those who get involved in it.

If you have an active, busy social life and if you are a bit of a party animal who needs to be surrounded by friends and family in order to thrive then being a chef is probably not the best career choice for you. Many chefs work in excess of 40 hours every week, sometimes more. To make things even more complicated, their working hours tend to be fairly erratic and extremely unsociable indeed meaning that they could be working first thing in the morning, all the way into the night. Looking forward to spending some time with the family on national holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving? Don’t be surprised if you get a phone call from your work asking if you can come in for “just a little while.”

There will be some readers who read the above and who will think:

“That maybe true when I am just starting out and slowly working my up the ladder but once I get to the top, I won’t need to worry so much.”

Wrong.

In fact, as you progress upwards in your chef career, you can be rest assured that as you play an even more fundamental role in the success of the kitchen, there will be even greater demands upon your skills and abilities. It is little wonder then that staff turnover rates for the hospitality and catering industry, and more specifically professional chefs, is extremely high. Many people simply cannot handle the stress and pressure of working in such a busy, hectic environment with heat constantly blasting at them from every angle. Throw in the lifting and carrying of heavy equipment along with the extremely high levels of noise that continually reverberate through a kitchen and you have all the makings of an extremely stressful and distressful environment indeed.

However, the only person who will ever truly know if you are indeed able to cope with the stresses of the hospitality career is you and one of the best ways to ascertain this is to get involved in work experience. Contact a restaurant or chef you would like to work with, and tell them that you are interested in accumulating work experience with a view to finding out whether it is the right career for you or not. You may have to do this voluntarily, and expect a fair amount of shouting at and stress.