Hospitality, Tourism & Sport
How to become a Chef
Also known as Commis Chef, Sous Chef, Executive Chef. Everything below comes from the same database our assessment scores against.
The route in
1. Diploma or undergraduate
3 years- Qualifications:
- B.Sc. Hospitality & Hotel Administration, Diploma in Culinary Arts, Craftsmanship certificate
- Entrance exams:
- NCHMCT JEE, Institutional entrance
- Typical cost:
- ₹80,000 to ₹12 lakh
What does a Chef earn in India?
Entry level
₹1.5 lakh – ₹4 lakh
per year
Mid career
₹5 lakh – ₹30 lakh
per year
Indicative. These bands are an editorial estimate assembled from public reporting, and have not yet been reconciled against a named dataset. Treat them as a shape, not a promise — the same title pays very differently across a service company, a product company and a start-up.
Outlook
Hiring demand
Growing — hiring faster than average.
Exposure to automation
Low. The core of this work is hard to automate — it depends on judgement, physical presence or accountability that does not transfer to software.
What does a Chef do?
What this actually looks like
A day as a Chef
What you would actually be doing
- Preparation work for hours before anybody eats anything
- Running a service where everything happens at once and then stops
- Costing dishes and controlling waste, which decides whether the kitchen survives
- Training and directing a brigade under time pressure
- Ordering, receiving and checking produce early in the morning
Who you work with
- A kitchen brigade, very closely and at speed
- Front-of-house staff, across a boundary that generates friction
- Suppliers and the restaurant's management
What you work with
- Knives and kitchen equipment, as an extension of your hands
- Point-of-sale and kitchen display systems
- Costing and stock control spreadsheets
Where and when: Hot, loud, physically hard, and on your feet for the whole shift. Split shifts and working evenings, weekends and festivals are normal. It is genuinely demanding work.
Working conditions
- Typical hours
- Split shifts, weekends and festivals
- Remote possible
- No — this is on-site work
- Travel
- low travel
- Physical demand
- high physical demand
Reality check
Before you choose chef
A report that only lists what is appealing about a career is an advertisement. This is the other half.
What people like about it
- You make something people enjoy, several hundred times a night
- Skills are portable — kitchens exist in every country
- You can progress on demonstrated competence rather than credentials
- Opening your own place is realistic, and many do
What is genuinely hard
- You work when everybody else is celebrating, including most festivals
- Entry pay is low and the early years are physically punishing
- Kitchen culture can be harsh, though this is changing
- Burns, cuts and long-term standing take a physical toll
- Who tends to enjoy this work
- Work well in controlled chaos, take real pride in consistency rather than only in creativity, and would rather be judged on tonight's service than on a review of last year.
- What the education journey is really like
- A hotel management degree or a craft diploma, then kitchen work from the bottom. This is a field where the apprenticeship is the education — where you train under whom matters more than the certificate.
Other legitimate ways in
The first route does not always work, and it is not always the best one. These are real alternatives, not consolation prizes.
Hotel school into a kitchen brigade
- BHM or a culinary diploma, through NCHMCT JEE or a private school
- Commis, then chef de partie in a hotel or restaurant kitchen
- Sous chef, then head chef or executive chef
The structured route. Hotel kitchens teach discipline and range that standalone kitchens often cannot.
Kitchen floor into your own place
- Kitchen experience, formal or picked up on the line
- Head chef or kitchen partner in a small restaurant
- Your own restaurant, cloud kitchen or food business
Where the earnings change, and where most of the financial risk in this trade sits.
Who may not enjoy being a Chef?
Nothing here is a judgement about you — it is what the job is like, listed so you can decide whether it is what you want.
- The hours look like this: split shifts, weekends and festivals.
- It cannot be done remotely. The work needs you physically there.
- It is physically demanding. This is not desk work, and the body notices over years.
- Entry pay starts low — from about ₹1.5 lakh a year — and rises with what you can show rather than on the day you qualify.
The four hardest things about the work itself are listed above, under what is genuinely hard. If those and the points here describe things you would rather not sign up for, that is a real answer and worth having before a stream or a degree is chosen around it.
What skills does a Chef need?
What the job actually asks for, split four ways. The assessment tells you which of these your own scores already speak to.
Technical skills
- Knife skills, cooking methods and consistency under volume
- Menu costing, portioning and food cost control
- Food safety, HACCP and kitchen hygiene
- Menu development and recipe standardisation
People skills
- Running a brigade through a service without losing control
- Taking correction fast and without argument
- Holding standards at the end of a fourteen-hour day
Digital and AI skills
- Kitchen and inventory management systems
- Costing and recipe management tools
- Building a professional profile and following online
Industry knowledge
- How hotel kitchens, standalone restaurants and cloud kitchens differ
- What food cost percentage means and why it governs the menu
- What opening your own place actually requires in capital and licences
If Chef appeals, also look at
Chosen by how far the interest pattern and the weighted activities of each one overlap with this. The reason is printed so you can disagree with it.
Hospitality, Tourism & Sport
People move between these two often. Experience in one counts toward the other. Both use service & hospitality.
Life Sciences & Environment
People move between these two often. Experience in one counts toward the other. Both use build & repair.
Health & Medicine
Suits a similar interest pattern — SIC against your RAE. The way in is different.
Hospitality, Tourism & Sport
Uses the same service & hospitality and process & coordination skills. You get in a different way.
Business & Management
People move between these two often. Experience in one counts toward the other. Both use process & coordination.
Streams this is reachable from
Exams worth knowing about
Where an exam has its own page, it lists every other career it opens — useful if this one turns out not to fit.
- NCHMCT JEE
- Institutional entrance
Where this qualification also leads
The degrees on this route open other doors too. Worth knowing before you commit to one destination.
Who tends to be happy here
People who rate these highly tend to stay in this work. If none of them sound like you, that is worth taking seriously.
- Achievement
- Relationships
- Independence
Are you sure Chef is the career you want?
Everything above describes the job. None of it tells you whether it fits you. So it is worth asking plainly, before a stream or a degree gets chosen around it.
- Not sure? Then this is exactly the question the assessment exists to answer. It compares you against Chef and 196 other careers, and shows the arithmetic behind every score, so you can see why rather than being handed a verdict.
- Quite sure? Then double-check anyway. Being certain is not the same as having checked, and the cost of finding out late is counted in years rather than in the 45 minutes this takes. If it confirms what you already think, you carry on with a reason instead of a hope — plus the education route, the entrance exams and a ninety-day plan.
And if it does not line up, nothing closes. Chef stays on your list with the gap named and a route attached, next to the careers your profile already reaches — so the answer is something to act on either way.
Other Hospitality, Tourism & Sport careers
Last verified 2026-08-01. This is a career-guidance instrument. It is not a clinical or diagnostic tool. It does not measure intelligence, IQ, or a person’s worth. Its results are one input among several, and are intended to be interpreted with a trained counsellor.