Chef CV Template for UK Jobs

A chef CV for UK jobs should open with your current kitchen role, your food hygiene training, and your most recent kitchen experience, in that order, in plain headings that both a head chef and hiring software can read. Build it from the job advert in front of you, keep every claim true, and check it before you send it.

A kitchen does not hire on fine words. A head chef reading your CV wants to know, in under a minute, which section you can run, how many covers you have handled, what food you cook, and whether your training is current. That is a different test from most office CVs. Nobody asks a chef to list soft skills in a long paragraph. They ask where you worked, what station you held, and what service looked like on your watch.

What follows builds that CV piece by piece, in an order shaped around how UK kitchens hire. It covers commis chefs, chefs de partie, sous chefs and pastry chefs separately, because one generic chef CV fits none of them well. It also shows you what to leave off a UK CV, how to write about kitchens when you are new to them, and how to check your CV before you send it.

What UK employers check first on a chef CV

A UK employer reads a chef CV with one question in mind: can this person work safely on our section, on a busy service, from the first shift? Four checks come before everything else. First, your current or most recent kitchen role. Second, your food safety training. Third, the kind of food and service you have actually worked in. Fourth, whether every line on it can be checked and trusted.

UK kitchens differ sharply from each other. A hotel banqueting kitchen, a small restaurant, a pub kitchen, a contract catering unit and a bakery all run on different rhythms. A CV that only says chef does not help an employer place you. A CV that says the section, the covers, the cuisine and the kitchens you have worked in lets the employer decide fast.

This is why a chef CV for UK jobs is not the same as a general CV. A general CV can start with a long summary about being passionate and hardworking. A chef CV starts with facts: role, section, training, kitchens. The passion still matters, but it belongs inside your experience bullets, where it is tied to real services you worked.

For the official picture of the job itself, including the roles the trade uses and the shift patterns kitchens run on, see the National Careers Service chef profile. Use it to check job titles and duties before you write, not as a source to copy from.

The template order that works

Use this order from top to bottom. It matches how a head chef scans a CV, and it matches the order hiring software expects.

First, your name and contact details: phone number and email address, plus the town or city you are based in. Nothing else is needed here.

Second, a short profile of three or four lines, written for the job in front of you. Third, your training and certificates, with dates. Fourth, your kitchen experience, newest first, with the employer, the town, the dates and the section for each job. Fifth, a short skills list. Sixth, your education, kept brief. Seventh, references available on request. Do not put someone else's phone number or email on your CV.

Keep the whole CV to one page if you are early in your career, and two pages at most once you have several years and more than one kitchen. Length is not quality. A tight page of dated, provable kitchen work beats a long list of duties every time.

Put your training section near the top if you are a new chef, and after experience if you are an experienced chef. The rule is simple: the thing the employer checks first goes first. For a new chef, training is the proof. For a sous chef, the kitchens are the proof.

Write a profile that fits the kitchen you want

Your profile is the short paragraph at the top of your CV, under your contact details. Three or four lines is the whole length it needs. Say what kind of chef you are, which section you run, what food you cook, and what settings you have worked in. Cut the rest.

A weak profile says: "I am a passionate and hardworking chef looking for a good job." That sentence could belong to any chef, and it tells the employer nothing they can use. A strong profile says: "Chef de partie with four years on grill and saute in busy restaurants, including services of 120 covers, holding current Level 2 food hygiene training." Every word in that profile is a fact the employer can check.

Draft the profile after everything else is written, so it reflects what the CV genuinely contains rather than promising things that never appear in it. If you are applying for a pastry job, the profile should talk about pastry work. If you are applying for a grill job, it should talk about grill work. Adjust the profile for every advert. Your history does not change. The emphasis does.

Write experience as sections, covers and menus

Your experience section is the heart of a chef CV. List your kitchen jobs newest first, with the employer name, the town or city, and the dates for each job. Under each job, give three or four bullets covering real work you handled. Each bullet should name the section, the service size, and the food.

Good bullets sound like this: "Ran the grill section for a 90-cover restaurant, preparing steaks, fish and sauces to order during evening service." Or: "Prepared starters and desserts for a 60-cover dining room, including daily specials built around seasonal produce." Or: "Set up the larder section each morning, portioned and labelled stock, and kept temperature records through the day."

Notice what these bullets do. They name the section. They name the covers. They name the food. They show preparation, service and records, which is what UK kitchens trust. They skip vague filler. Nothing in them claims more than you could back up with proof. If you worked a service with no missed courses or kept a section running while short-staffed, you may say so, but only if it is true, and only as one honest line, not as a boast across the whole CV.

If time passed between kitchen jobs, leave the dates as they are instead of stretching them. An honest gap on the page is far safer than a stretched date that falls apart when references are checked. Any other work from that stretch can appear as one brief line. A break between jobs is something kitchens understand. What they will not accept is a kitchen job that never existed.

Training and certificates: write them exactly

Food safety training is the second thing a UK kitchen checks, and it is the easiest part of a chef CV to get wrong. Write each certificate with its full name, the provider or awarding body, and the year. If a certificate has an expiry or renewal date, write that too.

The certificates most often asked for are food hygiene training, commonly Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene, allergen training, and HACCP awareness. Only list training you have actually completed. Never write a certificate you plan to take as if you already hold it. If it is booked, you may say it is booked, with the date. An employer would rather see an honest gap than discover a missing certificate on the first shift.

Allergen awareness deserves its own line, not a passing mention. Kitchens now handle allergen information on every service, and employers look for it. If you know the fourteen major allergens and how your kitchen records them, say so plainly. If you have worked under Natasha's Law labelling rules for prepacked food, say that too, in your own words, tied to the kitchen where you did it. Do not claim knowledge of rules you have not worked with.

Other training belongs here as well when you truly hold it: knife skills courses, health and safety training, first aid, or specialist courses such as butchery, fish preparation or pastry techniques. List them with years, and leave out short videos or briefings that were not certificates.

Chef CVs by role: one template, four versions

A single generic chef CV serves nobody well, because the four main kitchen roles are judged on different proof. Use the same template order, but change what you emphasise.

A commis chef CV leads with training and work placements. Name the college course, the food hygiene certificate, and any kitchen experience, paid or placement, with the sections you worked on. Say what you can already do without supervision: basic preparation, stock rotation, cleaning to standard. Employers hiring a commis chef expect a short CV and test practical skill instead.

A chef de partie CV leads with the section. Name it in the profile and in every job bullet: grill, saute, larder, pastry or fish. Give covers, service style and the dishes you owned. This is the role where section plus covers plus cuisine matters most, because the employer is hiring you for one station.

A sous chef CV leads with running a kitchen. Show that you have covered the head chef, run a service, managed a section team, ordered stock, and handled suppliers. Bullets should show decisions, not just cooking: rota cover, stock counts, wastage control, training a new starter. If you have costed a menu or changed a supplier, say so, with the kitchen where it happened.

A pastry chef CV leads with the range. Name the products: breads, cakes, desserts, chocolate work or ice cream, whichever you truly produce. Give service numbers where they help, such as desserts for a 100-cover restaurant or bread for a daily cafe trade. If you develop recipes, say so, and name one or two dishes you created that stayed on a menu.

If you are new to kitchens or changing careers

If you have no paid kitchen job yet, your CV still has something real to say. Put your training first, then any work experience, college kitchen work, volunteering or staging you have done. Name the kitchen or college, the dates, and the sections you worked on. A two-week placement described honestly beats a made-up job every time.

Transferable work helps when it is described in kitchen terms. Work in a cafe, a bakery counter, a butcher's shop or a school kitchen counts if you describe the tasks: food handling, temperature checks, cleaning schedules, working a busy counter. Do not dress it up as chef work it was not. Employers test it in the first interview question.

Career changers should say plainly why they are moving into kitchens, in one line, and then let the training and placement record speak. A short course plus a placement plus a realistic first target, such as a commis role, reads far better than a CV that claims senior experience from another trade.

Do not invent a kitchen job to fill the page. Kitchens are small worlds. A head chef will ask about a kitchen you named, and a single invented job ends the application. Build one small true thing first if a section is empty: a food hygiene course, a weekend of volunteering, a college taster. Then write about that.

What to leave off a UK chef CV

UK CVs follow a clear rule about personal details, and breaking it marks you out for the wrong reasons. Leave off your photograph, your date of birth, your age, your marital status and your nationality. The National Careers Service CV guide states this directly, and it also sets out the sections a CV should carry, how to handle gaps in your work history, and how to write a short work history for a first job.

Leave off your full home address as well. Your town or city is enough, plus a phone number and email address the employer can reach you on. Leave off salary history and salary expectations unless the advert asks for them. Leave off references' contact details; write references available on request instead.

Leave off long lists of duties copied from a job advert. A bullet that says responsible for all kitchen duties tells the employer nothing. A bullet that says ran the grill for 90 covers tells them everything. Leave off hobbies unless they show a skill the kitchen needs, such as growing produce or baking at home with a market stall. Leave off any claim you cannot explain in an interview or show in a trial shift.

Trial shifts are common in kitchens, and your CV should survive one. Every skill you list may be tested on the pass within days of the interview. List only skills you can use on a busy service today.

Use a plain layout hiring software can read

Many UK employers now use hiring software to collect and sort applications before a person reads them. If the software cannot read your file, no person may ever lay eyes on it. A simple layout takes that danger away.

Use one column of real text, standard headings such as Experience, Training and Skills, and a plain font. Give every job its dates. Keep words as words, not trapped in pictures, tables or graphics, since hiring software commonly fails to read text held inside an image. Skip multi-column designs, text boxes and decorative borders. Plain does not mean poor. Plain is what gets through.

The CV builder lets you build your CV on a plain, easy-to-read template, and you can test how it reads before sending. The guide on How to Make an ATS-Friendly CV explains these layout rules in fuller detail. A template keeps your CV readable at a glance. It cannot promise a pass from hiring software, an interview or a job, and no template honestly could. What it really does is strip out the formatting faults that leave a strong CV unread.

Check your CV before you send it

Read your CV once as a head chef would. Can you see the role, the section, the covers and the training in the first half page? If not, move them up. Then read it once as hiring software would: copy the whole file's text into a plain message and see if the order holds and nothing vanishes. If parts scramble, the layout is the problem, not your record.

Check the small things that end applications: a phone number with a wrong digit, an email address you no longer check, a job with missing dates, a certificate written without its level. Ask one other person to read it for spelling, because a CV with errors in dish names or section names reads as carelessness in a trade built on precision.

Then match the CV to the advert, line by line. If the advert asks for allergen training and you hold it, make sure it appears in the training section and not only in a bullet three jobs down. If it asks for pastry experience and yours is a small part of your record, bring it into the profile for this application. The guide on How to Write a CV That Gets Replies covers this matching step in more detail.

Finally, send the CV to one real job and learn from it. Look at today's checked jobs and pick a kitchen role that fits your true level, then run the ATS Check tool on your file before you apply. If you want help beyond the free builder, compare the free and paid plans and create a free account to keep your CV ready for the next advert. A chef CV is not finished when it looks good. It is finished when a head chef can place you on a section from the first page, and when every word on it is true.