Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager

What Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager Majors Need to Know

In an O*NET survey, food service, waiter/waitress, and dining room management/manager majors were asked to rate what knowledge areas, skills, and abilities were important in their occupations. These answers were weighted on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the most important.

Knowledge Areas for Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager Majors

This major prepares you for careers in which these knowledge areas are important:

• Customer and Personal Service - Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.
• Food Production - Knowledge of techniques and equipment for planting, growing, and harvesting food products (both plant and animal) for consumption, including storage/handling techniques.
• Production and Processing - Knowledge of raw materials, production processes, quality control, costs, and other techniques for maximizing the effective manufacture and distribution of goods.
• Administration and Management - Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.
• English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.

Skills for Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager Majors

When studying food service, waiter/waitress, and dining room management/manager, you’ll learn many skills that will help you be successful in a wide range of jobs - even those that do not require a degree in the field. The following is a list of some of the most common skills needed for careers associated with this major:

• Speaking - Talking to others to convey information effectively.
• Monitoring - Monitoring/Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvements or take corrective action.
• Coordination - Adjusting actions in relation to others’ actions.
• Active Listening - Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
• Service Orientation - Actively looking for ways to help people.

Abilities for Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager Majors

Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager majors often go into careers where the following abilities are vital:

• Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
• Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
• Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.

Amount of Education Required for Careers Related to Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager

Some careers associated with food service, waiter/waitress, and dining room management/manager require an advanced degree while some may not even require a bachelor’s. Whatever the case may be, pursuing more education usually means that more career options will be available to you.

How much schooling do you really need to compete in today’s job market? People currently working in careers related to food service, waiter/waitress, and dining room management/manager have obtained the following education levels.

Education Level	Percentage of Workers
Less than a High School Diploma	38.3%
High School Diploma - or the equivalent (for example, GED)	44.7%
Post-Secondary Certificate - awarded for training completed after high school (for example, in agriculture or natural resources, computer services, personal or culinary services, engineering technologies, healthcare, construction trades, mechanic and repair technologies, or precision production)	9.9%
Some College Courses	2.1%
Associate’s Degree (or other 2-year degree)	7.5%

Online Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager Programs

The following table lists the number of programs by degree level, along with how many schools offered online courses in the field.

Degree Level	Colleges Offering Programs	Colleges Offering Online Classes
Certificate (Less Than 1 Year)	0	0
Certificate (1-2 years)	10	0
Certificate (2-4 Years)	0	0
Associate’s Degree	5	0
Bachelor’s Degree	0	0
Post-Baccalaureate	0	0
Master’s Degree	0	0
Post-Master’s	0	0
Doctor’s Degree (Research)	0	0
Doctor’s Degree (Professional Practice)	0	0
Doctor’s Degree (Other)	0	0

Majors Related to Food Service, Waiter/Waitress, and Dining Room Management/Manager

You may also be interested in one of the following majors related to food service, waiter/waitress, and dining room management/manager.

Major	Number of Grads
Culinary Arts/Chef Training	10,286
Baking & Pastry Arts/Baker/Pastry Chef	5,508
General Cooking & Related Culinary Arts	3,586
Restaurant, Culinary, & Catering Management/Manager	1,291
Food Preparation/Professional Cooking/Kitchen Assistant	804
Other Culinary Arts & Related Services	382
Culinary Science/Culinology	278
Institutional Food Workers	214
Bartending/Bartender	194
Meat Cutting/Meat Cutter	54
Wine Steward/Sommelier	3

References

*The racial-ethnic minorities count is calculated by taking the total number of students and subtracting white students, international students, and students whose race/ethnicity was unknown. This number is then divided by the total number of students at the school to obtain the racial-ethnic minorities percentage.

• College Factual
• College Scorecard
• National Center for Education Statistics
• O*NET Online
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers First Quarter 2020
• Image Credit: By U.S. Army Europe Images under License

More about our data sources and methodologies.