Salary Information for Chefs with a Culinary Arts Degree

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A Degree Does not Mean Instant Success

Even the most preliminary research brings one major fact to attention; a culinary chef salary is not determined as much by advanced education, but location, type of establishment and experience in the field. Even with a culinary degree in your hand, your first restaurant job could be as a line cook. Line cooks are assistant cooks who specialize within a particular station of the kitchen, such as fry cook, grill cook, sauce and sauté cooks. Your beginning salary will average around $20,000 a year.

This can create quite a problem if you’ve taken out a loan to go to a culinary arts degree program. You are now massively in debt and it may take several years before you actually make a comfortable chef salary of $50,000 or more. Most chefs begin from the ground up, learning the basics of restaurant food preparation, and graduating through the various stations until they’ve reached a position of head cook or sous chef. Before actually becoming an executive chef, however, they are required to take administrative courses at a culinary school. The executive chef has the greatest responsibilities and commands the highest salary in the kitchen. Culinary arts students are generally advised to work part-time in a kitchen in order to add experience to their degree program. This way, they will not only be prepared with the skills needed to command a kitchen, they will have established themselves in the highly competitive restaurant industry.

How a Culinary Arts Degree Gives You an Edge

Two-thirds of all chefs and cooks work in the fast food business. The remaining one third are divided between restaurants, hospitality, food research, cafeterias, catering services and special enterprises. In nearly all aspects of the food industry, the culinary chef salary for graduates from a culinary school is higher than for those who rely simply on their years of experience in the food business. They have been trained to produce a wide variety of culinary dishes, are knowledgeable in nutrition and have learned to present their platters artistically, with an eye for color, arrangement and balance.

While experience and performance are the leading qualities that will ultimately land you a job with a five-star restaurant or hotel, many establishments require a culinary arts degree before being promoted to a chef’s position. These include corporate restaurants, clubs, cruise ships, and specialty restaurants.

Top Jobs for Those with a Culinary Arts Degree

While your dream may be to work as a master chef in a renowned kitchen, the truth is, very few culinary chefs make it to that $100,000 a year salary. Only ten percent earned more than $70,000 a year, while the medium culinary chef salary is $40,630 a year. You might find the statistics for best paying chefs jobs, apart from the name and fame of celebrated kitchens, a little surprising. The federal government pays the highest average culinary chef salary, at nearly $80,000 a year. In second place, are local government chefs, with an average $70,000 a year, while the private sector is slightly under, averaging out at $68,000 a year.

There are approximately one hundred chefs who service the finance and insurance industry. Their culinary chef’s salary averages $60,000 a year and includes a number of benefits and perks. Some culinary chef’s go into food science, where they analyze the nutritional value of different foods and perform experiments to make foods and food processing safer and healthier. Their pay scale falls into the average for all chefs, at approximately $54,000 a year.

The low end of a culinary chef’s salary is in health care and social assistance, education, food manufacturing, accommodation and food services and retail trade. Your culinary arts degree will qualify you for these positions, with an average salary between $30,000 and $44,000 a year.

While attending culinary school, you should have a clear idea of the type of food services you wish to go into. You should get as much first-hand experience as possible in a restaurant, cafeteria, club, hotel, lodge or other hospitality service. Make a name for yourself as someone who can deliver delicious platters and as the host with the most. Decide whether or not you want to specialize in a particular aspect of the cooking industry and follow your passion to create fine cuisine.