Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a chef and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A chef manages all the activities of a kitchen and ensures that the food is pleasing to the taste and the eyes of the customer. He/she supervises the preparation of food and makes sure that the food is seasoned properly and it is garnished and presented well.
Other duties include supervising staff taking part in food preparation, ordering and purchasing supplies depending on the expected demand of food, making and planning the menu, adjusting the menu depending on availability of food and season, making sure that sanitation regulations are met, controlling the cost of raw materials, ensuring that the raw and cooked food meets quality standards, monitoring production schedules and staff requirements,
Core Skills Required to be a Chef
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A chef should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Interviewing:
Interviewing is an essential skill in making a sound hiring decision that seeks to find out the candidate's background, work experience, skill level, general overall intelligence, enthusiasm, attitudes, etc.
A Chef ought to be equipped with the right techniques to handle interviews whether they are face to face or telephone as they can be grueling and intimidating to the candidate; clarity and calmness of tone and the atmosphere are ideal.
Leadership Skills:
Leadership Skills are soft skills that assist leaders in positively interacting with employees or team members to make the workplace a great place.
A Chef must be able to lead effectively by learning how to deal with all types of people in a way that motivates, enthuse and build respect in a bid to understand and develop his leadership skills.
Dedication to Work:
Dedication to Work is a devotion or setting aside the scheduled time that you are required to work each day consistently without fail as well as being on time and giving 100% of your efforts to doing quality work.
A Chef ought to be dependable and set an example for the rest of the workforce by showing up for work on time every day consistently and producing quality work while applying company policies and business strategies.
Work Attitude:
Work Attitude is one's feelings towards and beliefs about one's job and their behavior that can tell how it feels to be there.
A Chef ought to encourage his workers and provide all the requirements for the workplace to ensure a positive attitude is maintained by the employees that can help them get a promotion, succeed on projects, meet goals and enjoy the job more.
Adaptability:
Adaptability is the ability to cope with and adapt to unexpected situations in any environment and staying connected with a great attitude.
A Chef must shape the workplace with leadership skills that allow employees to adapt to the provided atmosphere and be able to give their best in the workplace while growing in their ability to become the best employees.
Emotion Management:
Emotion Management is the ability to realize, readily accept and successfully control feelings on oneself and sometimes in others around you by being in complete authority over your thoughts and feelings that are generated whenever your values are touched.
A Chef must be able to manage his emotions as well as assist the staff to control their emotions to ensure that the professional reputation, the efficiency, and productivity is not compromised.
Consistency and Reliability:
Consistency and Reliability are the ability to be trusted to do what you do best all the time with or without supervision and without failure to produce results.
A Chef is liable to maintain a high level of consistency and reliability by engaging with employees and treating them with respect deserved which produces excellent results in various kinds of reliability coefficients.
Monitoring Others:
Monitoring others is tracking employee activities monitor the worker engagement with the workplace-related tasks.
A Chef should always monitor his workers to measure productivity, track attendance, incoming and outgoing phone calls, safety spying, employee theft, employee's location, horseplay and collect proof of hours worked using the latest computer detective monitoring system that provides accurate data that cannot be debated.
Personal Accountability:
Personal Accountability is the feeling that you are entirely responsible for your actions and consequences taking ownership without blaming others.
A Chef should provide a list of duties and responsibilities that every employee is expected to perform and define timelines and supervisors who oversee the work to ensure each knows what she /he should do and remain accountable without passing blame.
Quality of Work:
The quality of Work is the value of work or products produced by the employees as well as the work environment they are provided with.
A Chef needs creativity in assisting all teams in identifying characteristics that will result in a quality product and lead to greater efficiency and increased productivity by following the four critical outcomes of employee retention, customer satisfaction, profitability, and productivity.
Hard Skills Required to be a Chef
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A chef should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.