Create a Better Chef Resume With These Tips and Tricks

Contact information

The first section is your resume header. Here, you’ll add your full name, phone number, location, email address and links to your professional job networking profiles, such as your LinkedIn profile.

Resume summary or objective

Next is your resume summary or resume objective. This is a 2-3 sentence paragraph at the top of your resume. In a resume summary, you will highlight your most important experience and achievements as a chef. If you are just starting your chef career and lack work experience, you want to write a resume objective and state what you would like to accomplish in your career.

Skills

Skills are always going to be a big part of any resume, and a chef resume sample will often include many of these skills. Aside from general food preparation, which any chef will need to have some skills in, here are a few bullet points you might see in a skills section:

• Fine dining experience
• Food safety training
• Understanding food cost and pricing
• Menu creation and ongoing menu development
• Multitasking
• Meeting quality standards
• Working with a restaurant manager
• Time management skills
• Working with kitchen equipment
• Maintaining food quality
• Grilling, sautéing, and other methods of cooking
• General kitchen operations
• Creating new menu items
• Specific cooking techniques
• Managing customer satisfaction
• Fulfilling dietary requirements

You need both hard skills and soft skills to thrive as a professional chef. It’s not enough to just know how to cook. You also need to know how to work with the people you’ll see and work alongside every day.

Work history

In your work history section, you should include up to 10 years of experience from previous jobs. Here are a few chef job titles that might be beneficial to feature in your experience section:

• General kitchen staff
• Sous chef
• Head chef
• Executive chef
• Pastry chef
• Line cook

Of course, these different job titles vary depending on a chef’s experience level and years of culinary experience. On a resume, a  sous chef job role might rely more heavily on non-cooking kitchen staff positions than an executive chef resume would. However, all of these positions have transferable skills that can teach you different lessons about food service.

Education

While some people working in a chef job only have high school experience, some pursue an education in the culinary arts and lean towards a role as a  classical chef. Any related education, degrees, training or certifications should go in the education section of your resume.