Chefs Career Advice from Jonathon Warner, Course Co-ordinator

Chef Career Advice

Based on his extensive experience working within Culinary Education Industry, Course Co-ordinator, Jonathon Warner offers his advice to aspiring Chefs in an attempt to help them on their journey up the career ladder:

Hi my names Jonathon Warner, I'm a Chef lecturer for the third year full time culinary arts and I also teach the foundation degree as well. I've been here about five years now.

The best bit of advice I would give is especially early in their career is to aim for the top, aim for the best establishment they can get in to, it all depends on what type of cuisine there into, once they've learnt to cook at the top level everything else will fall into place. I think a young Chef can expect hard work, a huge amount of satisfaction, diversity, lots of choice in terms of travel and a great community as well.

The best careers advice that I was given actually was when I got my first Sous Chef job, actually the Head Chef turned round to me and said look it's fine to be like that but sometimes you have to be an island especially when you're in responsibility so I would say that to a lot of young Chefs. When you got a lot of responsibility you have to make yourself a bit of an island be accessible but at the same time have barriers around you I think it's important to learn. For students who come to this college, I would expect them to have some background knowledge, to begin with because it means that they think about it constantly.

When a student comes onto the 3 year course at Westminster Kingsway college they can expect hard work, to learn as much as they want to learn, they can expect expert advice, they can expect lots and lots of different opportunities talking about travel, top work experience placements and again going back to community, the Westminster community as well.

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