Australia

Okay, I’m not defending anything here but I need to call you and @randomthin2332@lemmy.world out for a second. A chef is not the same thing as a cook. Chef’s are responsible for all of the logistics of running a kitchen. They are responsible for creating the product; organising suppliers; portioning & costing each serving; budgeting for, interviewing and hiring the rest of the kitchen staff; pricing each meal to account for these costs with a reasonable profit margin; managing the kitchen staff; maintaining food safety standards, including mandatory logs; running the kitchen during service most nights of the week, on top of prepping & cooking. You generally have a Head & Sous Chef in most kitchens who occupy managerial roles. You might have another chef or two underneath them depending on the size of the kitchen. Then below them you have Cooks, whose job is to only focus on the hands-on aspects of preparing and cooking the food. You’re following someone else’s recipes and plating it to their guidelines.

“Cooking classes” or “6 month courses” will not give someone the skills to be a chef. It takes ~2yrs of study or a ~3yr apprenticeship to become qualified. What you’re both suggesting would only qualify someone to work as a cook, and there’s already a huge surplus in the industry thanks to covid. There are also genuine, tangible reasons why a business might want to hire a chef from overseas with specific culinary experience.

But besides all that, from my personal experience working in kitchens, I think this is a terrible idea. The woman at the start of the article is in the disability stream of Jobstart, as are a lot of people in the “long-term unemployed” category. She either doesn’t quite meet the requirements or, more likely, can’t afford the specialists required to meet Centrelink’s evidentiary burden. I’m on the DSP now, and while the condition I have is a genetic one, I strongly believe it was exacerbated by spending my career working as a chef. A very short career I’ll add. It is a much more physically demanding job than people give it credit for.

Why not just look internally at industry demand instead? On the topic of disability, there is a shortage of skilled support workers in that industry. I have some capacity to work, and because of my age, need to engage with a DES. I’ve been trying to get one to organise a community support certificate for over 2 years. I have a license and I’m good with admin. But instead, every one of them has tried to push me to renew my food safety cert and just “get a job in a café” because of my chef qual. Which, besides every other reason it’s a terrible idea, would have massively increased my chances of getting covid when I’m high-risk and still need regular boosters.