Starting very early in my catering career as little more than a kitchen porter, I spent my early years realising that I wanted some direction and challenges in my life, so when a role came up as a chef in the kitchen, I applied and was awarded the post. This led to attending professional catering college to gain my professional cookery certificates and with relevant years of experience, led to varying promotions. Some years later I decided to continue learning and returned to college on a part time basis to gain a BTEC in Hotel Management.Whilst I didn't leave the catering side of the business, it enabled me to have a greater understanding of the finances involved of running a catering establishment and enabled me to take on higher positions.My some 28 years in the catering trade enabled me to learn and develop into a strong team leader in a notoriously hostile environment of professional kitchens but it did give me the chance to adopt a style of leadership that was 'against the grain' in the industry. I discovered early on that understanding a persons will and desire to strive for excellence and tapping into their talent offered the chance of coaching and mentoring young chefs to realise they could succeed in the industry of their choice and gave me the opportunity to develop many young people into fantastic ambassadors of their trade.I then moved into a more development role where I could take that training to the next level and make it my job to train aspiring school cooks into productive chefs where they could discover talent and style that they didn't know they had. A wonderfully rewarding post that brought many smiles with the team I was involved in.Due to unforeseen circumstances, I decided to leave the 'kitchen' side of things and move to a post of Senior Management level with a supplier or fine foods (of which I had been a customer) in a development role of products and people taking on the full employee life cycle and implementing many structures that were missing from a standard company operating procedures.With my team, full company policies, contracts, training plans and on-boarding was the first task to set up and along the way there has obviously been many developments. Whilst I hold no certificates for Human Resource, I have spent many decades building teams, developing personnel and achieving targets with a determination to succeed that comes from early days in the kitchens. Knowledge is gained through experience and a desire to know.