How Do I Become a Catering Assistant?

Catering assistants are professionals who help chefs to prepare food items that clients need for various occasions such as workplace meetings or even wedding receptions. These individuals must be able to work under strong deadline pressure and have an affinity for working with food. If you aspire to become a catering assistant, you need to consider completing two years of post-secondary education, during which you must master food and business-related courses. In addition, acquiring experience in a real-world setting prepares you to claim a role in this industry.

A person who wishes to become a catering assistant should complete a two-year associate degree program in an area such as hospitality management. Potential schools will typically ask you to send in your latest standardized test scores along with your high school diploma or the equivalent certification. You also need to turn in your completed enrollment form as well as your high school transcript.

Courses on food management get you ready to succeed in this industry. You must study food safety and sanitation because, when you become a catering assistant, you likely will have to help a chef to prepare meal items and must understand how to do so in a clean environment. Mastering how to store different types of edible products in a hygienic manner and paying attention to their expiration dates is important for ensuring that your company offers products and service that is high in quality.

Other classes teach you the business side of this career area. The curricula cover how to track the generation of food as well as how to promote to current and potential customers your company’s offerings. You also should learn about making sure that food products are purchased within a certain organizational budget amount as you train to become a catering assistant.

Some training programs do not make completing an internship a requirement to earn a degree, but practical training is absolutely essential for a successful career in this vocational area. Your college’s career services office can tell you about local catering companies that are willing to help to train a student who plans to become a catering assistant. During your internship, you need to get used to helping cooks to buy food ingredients as well as preparing items for use in cooking. In addition, you must be detail-oriented when checking to make sure that foods are still fit to use and when confirming meal orders from clients.