Work experience

Trying out a career helps you find out if it's right for you. This week: becoming a chef

If you were a celebrity chef, who would you be? The cheeky geezer Jamie Oliver? The volatile and unquotable Gordon Ramsay? The sultry, chocolate-loving Nigella Lawson? For a moment you think that, finally, the world has enough of them, but then five more come along. Darina and Rachel Allen may be the only equivalent that Ireland has, but maybe that means there is room for more.

Unfortunately, it's not quite enough to be a great cook. There is an awful lot more to running a kitchen than the television would have you believe. "You need a good business head on your shoulders," says Anthony Armstrong of the Panel of Chefs in Ireland. An award-winning cook, he runs the Fillet of Soul restaurant, in Co Leitrim, and he has a couple of pointers for those with their sights on a Michelin star. "You need to really want it. It is a hard slog, and it definitely doesn't happen overnight." A good basic training seems to be the most essential thing, but it is surprising what talents can come in handy. "I was always pretty good at art," says Armstrong, "It helped me with plate arrangements and with the basic idea that if food looks good it'll taste good."

"Work experience is advisable," says Robert Dagger, head of the hotel and catering department at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. "It's a good thing if people come into us with their eyes open. We assume that people have no experience, but it's a positive thing if someone has." He also stresses the importance of people management, "There are better ways of dealing with people than Gordon Ramsay's style, of bleeping this and bleeping that," he says.

The good news is that getting work experience in a kitchen should be reasonably easy. Dagger says: "Hotels and restaurants are finding it difficult to get Irish people into their kitchens. Maybe two people out of a team of five might be Irish, so I'd say that they'd be reasonably open."

If you hope to secure high-quality work experience:

Write to restaurants and hotels in your area with a CV and covering letter.

Make a follow-up phone call and see what is expected of you. Choose wherever promises the broadest range of experience.

Be prepared to do anything. Wash dishes and generally get stuck in.

See if you can come in and hang around when orders are being made and inventories are taken.

Ask questions about decisions that are made. Sourcing food is incredibly important, so find out about that as well.

Learn as much as you can about the general working of the hotel or restaurant. The more you find out, the better your career decision will be.

For more information, go to www.failteireland.ie/education_training.