In the next fifteen years, over three million service industry jobs in the US will be moving to countries overseas according to Forrester Research. This shift impacts several industries, ranging from technology to financial services to telemarketing and customer service. With this exodus of jobs leaving the US, job security is becoming increasing difficult for US workers. If it seems that no industry is safe, think again. Job opportunities within the restaurant and food service industry are continuing to ramp up here on our national soil.
The National Restaurant Association projects that nearly thirteen million people will work in the nation’s restaurants in 2007. Restaurants are the second largest US employer, second to government. With 935,000 restaurants in the US serving up over $530 billion in food sales, the job opportunities are unlimited.
If you are contemplating working in a restaurant as either a full time job or just a part-time gig, you are heading down a popular path. According to the National Restaurant Association, 48% of US adults have been on a restaurant’s payroll at some point. If you are new to the workforce, pursuing a restaurant job is an excellent choice, as exemplified by the 32% of adults who got their first job experience in a restaurant. Even famous celebrities earned their early paychecks in a restaurant including Chris Rock, Jennifer Aniston and Mariah Carey.
When it comes to the gender of restaurant workers, women tip the scales slightly. Restaurant workers are comprised of 55% women according to the National Restaurant Association’s 2007 projections. Furthermore, the restaurant worker crowd tends to be young with 53% of restaurant employees under the age of 30. If you are single and looking to meet people, you have another reason to look into a restaurant job. According to the National Restaurant Association, 66% of restaurant employees are single
The most popular restaurant jobs overall are servers (waiter, waitresses), managers, hosts and hostesses, cooks, busboys and dishwashers. To be successful in any of the above occupations, it is important that you be customer service-oriented and open to working with a diverse group of people from all different backgrounds and ethnicities. According to the National Restaurant Association, minorities and women represent three of five owners of eating and drinking place firms, with the national average being less than half for all US firms. Furthermore, in 2005, 16% of first-line supervisors of food preparation and service workers were Hispanic and 14% were African-American.
Eating out is a popular pastime and shows no signs of decreasing. When interviewing consumers, four of the five say that eating out at a restaurant is a more pleasurable way to use their leisure time than cooking at home according to the National Restaurant Association.
The future is bright for restaurant and food service workers. Both the limited service and full service restaurant sectors are growing and projected to create approximately 1.3 million employment opportunities by the year 2014 according to the BLS. When considering the estimated number of people who will exit the food service industry during that time, about 6 million workers will be needed to enter the restaurant industry.