What Chefs and Head Cooks Actually Move Into

Occupation move map · Food Preparation and Serving · Also covers: First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers

Most career-change advice for chefs and head cooks is somebody's opinion. This page is not. It is built from 58,121 observed occupation changes in the U.S. Current Population Survey — real people, tracked from one job to the next, not survey respondents describing what they would like to do.

Of every 100 chefs and head cooks who moved to a different occupation group, here is where they went.

The most common destination is cooks, fast food, at 16.5% of movers (446 observed transitions); the second is food service managers at 4.9% (416).

Seen at the group level, split estimated

Movers from chefs and head cooks were observed entering the occupation groups these belong to, but the split to each specific occupation was not directly observed, so no share is shown.

• Counter and Rental Clerks — estimated, 0 direct observations

Occupations with a similar skill profile

Ranked by skill similarity from O*NET, not by observed moves. A place to look, not a measured path.

• First-Line Supervisors of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers
• Aircraft Cargo Handling Supervisors
• Food and Tobacco Roasting, Baking, and Drying Machine Operators and Tenders
• Butchers and Meat Cutters

Who moves into chefs and head cooks

The occupations whose movers most often arrive here, by observed transitions.

• Cooks, Fast Food — 426 observed moves (7.5% of that occupation's movers)
• Food Service Managers — 391 observed moves (1.0% of that occupation's movers)
• Food Preparation Workers — 139 observed moves (7.5% of that occupation's movers)
• Fast Food and Counter Workers — 89 observed moves (2.9% of that occupation's movers)
• Waiters and Waitresses — 79 observed moves (2.9% of that occupation's movers)

How to read these numbers honestly

These are shares conditional on moving — the denominator is people in this occupation who changed to a different occupation group, not everyone in it. Most people in any given period do not move at all, so this page tells you the direction of movement, not how likely you are to move.

The underlying occupation codes are re-derived from job descriptions at each interview, which manufactures some transitions that never happened. We control for that four ways: we work at coarse occupation groupings rather than fine codes, we down-weight occupation changes not corroborated by an employer or industry change, we prefer the dependent-coded monthly survey over the retrospective annual one, and we shrink thin cells toward a skill-similarity prior. The residual uncertainty is why every row carries its observation count.

A row is marked Observed when at least 30 direct transitions were recorded; Thin evidence when fewer were; and Estimated when none were — the move to that occupation's group was observed, and the split to this particular occupation is allocated by skill similarity, so no share is shown.

Snapshot cps-movegraph-759b8583ddf6, frozen June 30, 2026. Held-out validation: precision@5 of 0.238, against 0.163 for a popularity baseline and 0.154 for a skill-similarity baseline.

What this page cannot tell you

It cannot tell you which of these moves fits your own record. A destination that many movers take is still the wrong move for most individuals — the ranking is population-level, and your last three roles, your credentials and what you actually want change it substantially.

See which of these moves your own experience already supports.

Career Companion reads your résumé and scores these destinations against what you have actually done, not against the population average. Start free →

Related

• Where cooks, fast food go next
• Where food service managers go next
• Where first-line supervisors of retail sales workers go next
• Where food preparation workers go next
• The full occupation move map