A kitchen cook is someone who works in a kitchen and prepares delicious food to feed hungry customers. While most kitchen cooks work in restaurants, they can also work in school cafeterias, hospitals, or other places where people need to be fed. They usually follow the direction of a chef, who is the head of a kitchen and creates the menu.
It goes without saying that kitchen cooks need to be good at cooking food. However, cooking in a busy kitchen requires some additional skills than when you're just whipping up a tasty sauce at home. Kitchen cooks need to be able to work quickly in a confined, crowded space to serve many customers. They also need to follow strict safety regulations so that their kitchen doesn't get shut down by government inspectors.
There are many paths to becoming a kitchen cook. Some cooks choose to get a bachelor's degree or go to culinary school. However, most work their way up to this position with practical restaurant experience alone. Cooks only earn an average salary of $26,674 and spend many long hours working on their feet, but for many, the satisfaction of preparing good food for customers is worth the work.
How to Become a Kitchen Cook
What is a Kitchen Cook
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a Kitchen Cook. For example, did you know that they make an average of $14.27 an hour? That's $29,680 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 11% and produce 282,000 job opportunities across the U.S.
What Does a Kitchen Cook Do
There are certain skills that many Kitchen Cooks 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 Sense of taste and smell, Dexterity and Physical stamina.
How To Become a Kitchen Cook
If you're interested in becoming a Kitchen Cook, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 20.5% of Kitchen Cooks have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 1.8% of Kitchen Cooks have master's degrees. Even though some Kitchen Cooks 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 Kitchen Cook. When we researched the most common majors for a Kitchen Cook, we found that they most commonly earn High School Diploma degrees or Bachelor's Degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on Kitchen Cook resumes include Associate Degree degrees or Diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a Kitchen Cook. In fact, many Kitchen Cook jobs require experience in a role such as Cashier. Meanwhile, many Kitchen Cooks also have previous career experience in roles such as Cook or Sales Associate.
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Kitchen Cook Career Paths
In addition to switching up your job search, it might prove helpful to look at a career path for your specific job. Now, what's a career path you ask? Well, it's practically a map that shows how you might advance from one job title to another. Our career paths are especially detailed with salary changes. So, for example, if you started out with the role of Cook you might progress to a role such as Sous Chef eventually. Later on in your career, you could end up with the title General Manager.
Kitchen Cook Jobs You Might Like
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Average Salary for a Kitchen Cook
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5 Kitchen Cook Resume Examples
Build a professional kitchen cook resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 5+ resume templates to create your kitchen cook resume.
Bobby Murphy Kitchen Cook |
Bobby Murphy Kitchen Cook Experience Kitchen Cook2020 - Present McDonald's•Chicago, IL
Specialty Foods Cook2018 - 2020 McDonald's•Milwaukee, WI
Cart Pusher2016 - 2018 Walmart•Milwaukee, WI
Skills Hand BasketsGuest ServicePositive AttitudeMenu ItemsFood ProductsWeather ConditionsWal-MartStorage AreasKitchen EquipmentPush Carts Education High School Diploma 2016 - 2016 |
Learn How To Write a Kitchen Cook Resume
At Zippia, we went through countless Kitchen Cook resumes and compiled some information about how to optimize them. Here are some suggestions based on what we found, divided by the individual sections of the resume itself.
View Kitchen Cook Resume Examples And TemplatesAnd if you’re looking for a job, here are the five top employers hiring now:
Choose From 10+ Customizable Kitchen Cook Resume templates
Zippia allows you to choose from different easy-to-use Kitchen Cook templates, and provides you with expert advice. Using the templates, you can rest assured that the structure and format of your Kitchen Cook resume is top notch. Choose a template with the colors, fonts & text sizes that are appropriate for your industry.
Kitchen Cook Demographics
Kitchen Cook Gender Distribution
After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:
- Among Kitchen Cooks, 34.2% of them are women, while 65.8% are men.
- The most common race/ethnicity among Kitchen Cooks is White, which makes up 62.4% of all Kitchen Cooks.
- The most common foreign language among Kitchen Cooks is Spanish at 58.4%.
Find the best Kitchen Cook job for you
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Online Courses For Kitchen Cook That You May Like
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Top Skills For a Kitchen Cook
The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we've found all of the skills you'll need so even if you don't have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 30.7% of Kitchen Cooks listed Menu Items on their resume, but soft skills such as Sense of taste and smell and Dexterity are important as well.
Best States For a Kitchen Cook
Some places are better than others when it comes to starting a career as a Kitchen Cook. The best states for people in this position are Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Hawaii. Kitchen Cooks make the most in Massachusetts with an average salary of $38,995. Whereas in New Jersey and Connecticut, they would average $38,289 and $37,214, respectively. While Kitchen Cooks would only make an average of $37,027 in Hawaii, you would still make more there than in the rest of the country. We determined these as the best states based on job availability and pay. By finding the median salary, cost of living, and using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Location Quotient, we narrowed down our list of states to these four.
1. Arizona
$34,065
Avg. Salary
2. Illinois
$35,076
Avg. Salary
3. Connecticut
$37,214
Avg. Salary
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Kitchen Cook Videos
