Areas of Hospitality / transferring skills

So if you want to change jobs what choices are there when it comes to transferring their skills within the hospitality marketplace? For example let’s take someone working as a Pastry Chef de Partie in a hotel who wants to move on to a different area within hospitality to gain experience and move up their career ladder – what options are open to them?

Well hospitality is a huge area if you think about it, everywhere from London Zoo to Buckingham Palace plus care homes and hotels will have a kitchen preparing food to people. But obviously not all kitchens will be the same though and with our candidate just looking for a pastry chef role, not all kitchens will produce fresh pastry and patisserie. This is why it is imperative that when applying for a job in the hospitality industry that you make sure you do your homework and research the areas that:

1. will be right for you and your next career step on the ladder
2. will give you a good chance of enjoying the work and be in a good position to stay on for a decent amount of time without having to move to another position too quickly as this can go against you if potential employers think you’re a ‘Job Hopper’.

So how would you go about researching your specialist area?

Using the internet to find jobs is something that a lot of people are doing these days. Jobs can still be found in the local newspaper, but there is so much more available on the web by using internet job boards/sites such as this one and the internet is an amazing tool making research material so much easier to access.

So for our example, where could a pastry chef move to from a hotel environment?

There are various options such as cruise ships, where the larger ones have large teams of chefs and usually producing food to a very high standard, so this would also give our candidate the chance to travel plsu possibly experience different cultures and countries. 

Some restaurants, usually larger ones or fine dining "A La Carte" places will have at least one pastry chef that is responsible for producing the fresh desserts and pastry products. Another option might be catering companies which can employ literally thousands of staff who work in many different areas such as private or corporate events through to dining for banks and financial institutions directors. Pastry chefs are very much needed in all of these areas due to a high demand for freshly produced products. Working for a contract catering company may also give our candidate opportunities to work in areas that otherwise might not have been possible given the contacts a catering company has with many high profile and influential organisations.

This can be a big plus when it comes to writing your CV and applying for further jobs in the future. Some more areas a pastry chef could use their skills obtained in the Hotel industry would be Conference & Banqueting companies, various quality Member Clubs, Gastro Pubs and bars amongst others.

As a final word on career progression, when an employer looks at a CV for a certain position, almost all of them will like to see a certain amount of stability within a candidates working history. As previously mentioned, moving on too quickly plus having too many jobs within a short amount of time isn’t generally looked upon favourably. This is why researching your next move is so vitally important and why there should be a degree of fluidity and to some extent, common ground between the jobs on a CV.