Chefs Career Advice from Gary Hunter, Head of Faculty for Hospitality and Culinary Arts

Chef Career Advice

Based on his extensive experience working within Hospitality and Culinary Arts, Head of Faculty, Gary Hunter offers his advice to aspiring Chefs in an attempt to help them on their journey up the career ladder:

My name is Gary Hunter, I am Head of Faculty for hospitality and culinary arts at Westminster Kingsway College.

I think the biggest piece of advice that I can offer any student leaving college to go into industry right now, is to try and work as many different places as possible from for starge and try and see what the industry is all about and get an idea about the diverse range of jobs they could do within the industry.

I think industry today is very vibrant, it is very diverse and an exciting place to work in and I think young students today certainly have a lot more information about the industry than when I was a student many years ago and they seem to enter the industry with their eyes wide open but they should explore that industry because it is so diverse it is unbelievable. The best bit of advice I have ever been given is that it doesn't matter what kitchen you work in, you will always learn something from everybody that you work with and it is an experiential thing so you gain experience wherever you work and whatever you do, it's about how you use that experience.

I think for candidates when they leave college the industry are looking for someone who is diverse, somebody who has different complexity of skills so they can do front of house work, they understand about customer service, they know about communication and they can cook in the kitchen at the same time so they need to be as valuable to the employer as they possibly can and not just be a one trick pony.

A young person coming into Westminster Kingsway College can expect 3 years of very hard studying, that is going to test them all of the time everything that we do here is up to date to the limit because work hand in hand with the industry so they can expect to be introduced to industry right from the work go so they are job ready when they finish with us.

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