Food Service Worker Cook

Measured from 698 live food service worker postings and the destination’s own corpus. Updated with the nightly scrape.

87%Skill readiness
$30k–$45kPosted salary band
804Live openings today

3–8 mo transition · High job demand · 0% fully remote

Full cook pay data: median, seniority curve, by country and US state
Career graph · Food Service WorkerTop match 87%
CookChefWaiterFlight AttendantAutomotive TechnicianMaintenance TechnicianHVAC TechnicianElectronics Technician

The judgment call

A food service worker reaches cook at 87 percent skill readiness, measured from 698 live food service worker postings against what cook postings ask for. At that number it is a genuinely close move.

What carries over: Food Service, Line Cooking, Food Safety, Catering & Banquet.

Posted pay for cook runs $30k–$45k, demand is rated high, and the estimated time to close the gap is 3–8 mo. This read is drafted from the numbers; the graph above is the full skill map behind them.

Evidence checklist

What cook postings ask for, against what a typical food service worker already demonstrates. Drawn from the skill-overlap data, curated by hand.

You already have
  • Food ServiceCoveredIn the typical food service worker profile
  • Line CookingCoveredIn the typical food service worker profile
  • Food SafetyCoveredIn the typical food service worker profile
  • Catering & BanquetCoveredIn the typical food service worker profile
The gap

No named gap skills in this route’s data; the residual is depth, not breadth.

Open cook roles you could move into

Live openings, freshest first. Apply at the source.

See all 804 cook jobs

Related routes

804 open cook roles on the board nowPay where it is posted. Your food service worker profile already covers 87% of what they ask.BrowseRun your own numbers on the instrumentEdit the skills, watch the map recompute, export the six-page report for this route. Free, no account.Open

Quick answers

Can a food service worker become a cook?

Posted-skill readiness is 87 percent in our corpus. The skills that carry are Food Service, Line Cooking, Food Safety; the gap is narrow.

What skills does a food service worker need to become a cook?

Already covered by a typical food service worker profile: Food Service, Line Cooking, Food Safety, Catering & Banquet. The graph on this page shows the full overlap, skill by skill.

How long does the food service worker to cook move take?

Our estimate from the skill gap is 3–8 mo, shorter for anyone who already holds part of the destination skill set.

What does a cook earn?

Posted pay is $30k–$45k, with demand rated high. The salary page for cook carries the full distribution.

Method: skill readiness is coverage of the destination’s posting-skill weight by a typical food service worker profile; salary bands are posted 25th–75th percentiles; observed flow is worker-transition data derived from the CPS (Current Population Survey; see the method section on the instrument). July 2026 corpus. In a typical year 12.2% of food service worker workers move to a different occupation (BLS Employment Projections, 2024–34).

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