
#1 - Baking and Pastry Arts Culinary Schools
You cannot enter just any culinary school. You need to enter baking and pastry arts culinary schools that will provide you with the in-depth knowledge into the topics you need to learn in order to be successful. Consider what courses are offered at the schools to ensure you are learning about everything that is of interest to you. Not all schools provide courses on chocolate tempering, ice cream and sorbet, and bread baking.
#2 - Internships
To be involved in a culinary career in the pastry/baking side of things, you need experience. You get experience through internships. The school you attend may help you with these. Otherwise you will need to get them on your own. Consider where you will go for your internships and whether you will stay local or go into one of the culinary capitals of the world - NYC, Paris, Florence, or elsewhere.
If you don't do any internship, it makes it hard to prove that you know what you are doing. You need to be versatile in what you can create and follow the proper techniques. From crepes to cakes to cookies, there are forms and flavor profiles that you should be following and an internship can help.
#3 - What Will You Be Baking?
What do you want to bake on a day to day basis? With a career as a baker, you may bake a variety of different things. You may bake breads, bagels and rolls or you may bake cakes and cupcakes. You may need to consider what you want to bake before you choose a culinary school. If you want to bake cupcakes and cakes, you may also want to enroll in a decorating class or two.
You should never learn to bake just one thing. Even as a bread baker, you want to be able to create the sweet and the savory - that means everything from banana nut bread to pumpernickel.
#4 - Where Will You Work?
A career in culinary arts can be virtually anywhere. As a baker, you can work for a restaurant, a hotel, a bakery, a supermarket and various other places. You may even want to go into business for yourself and open a bakery where you can create what you want throughout the year. Where you will work is an important consideration when you look into the various career paths that you can take.
#5 - How Much Do You Wish to Earn?
When you consider a baking career, you also want to consider how much you can make. You may be able to earn upward of $40,000 a year. This is dependent upon where you work in the country, what kind of education you have, and who your employer is. The more you know about baking and pastry, the more you become valuable to your employer. This means that you want to be versatile in terms of what you can bake and what the end product looks like.