Cake decorators spend their time decorating cakes to standards specified by customers. They are responsible for consulting with customers to discuss desired cake designs and then designing and decorating cakes to customers' specifications. They also often decorate regular bakery items and prepare different kinds of icings, frostings, and cake fillings based on customer specifications.
Cake decorators are also responsible for cleaning and sanitizing all work areas, ovens, and baking and decorating equipment as well as for taking inventory of baking and decorating supplies and ordering new stock as required.
Cake decorators need excellent communication, customer service, organizational, time management, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. They also need to be polite, courteous, and friendly, have a genuine desire to help customers, work well with a team, have manual dexterity, and have the ability to stand for long periods of time.
The most basic requirement for becoming a cake decorator is a high school diploma. However, having a degree in a field related to culinary science is an advantage. Previous experience with cake decorating is valuable, but you will also receive hands-on training while working in a bakery.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a cake decorator. For example, did you know that they make an average of $15.18 an hour? That's $31,567 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 2% and produce 2,700 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many cake decorators have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed artistic ability, color vision and physical strength.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a cake decorator, we found that a lot of resumes listed 17.2% of cake decorators included bakery products, while 15.7% of resumes included food safety, and 9.7% of resumes included customer service. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the cake decorator job title. But what industry to start with? Most cake decorators actually find jobs in the retail and hospitality industries.
If you're interested in becoming a cake decorator, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 20.8% of cake decorators have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 1.4% of cake decorators have master's degrees. Even though some cake decorators have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a cake decorator. When we researched the most common majors for a cake decorator, we found that they most commonly earn high school diploma degrees or associate degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on cake decorator resumes include bachelor's degree degrees or diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a cake decorator. In fact, many cake decorator jobs require experience in a role such as cashier. Meanwhile, many cake decorators also have previous career experience in roles such as sales associate or customer service representative.