Every January, a few members write to us with some version of the same resolution: "I want to actually get good at this in 2024, not just keep the vats running." One assistant cheesemaker at a small farmstead operation in the upper Midwest is our favorite example this year of turning that into something concrete, so we asked her to walk us through it.
She'd been making cheese for two years, mostly following someone else's make sheet and mostly getting it right. What she didn't have, in her own words, was a way to tell the difference between "it worked" and "I understood why it worked." So instead of a vague resolution, she built a syllabus: one course a quarter, aimed specifically at the gaps she could name.
Starting with the gap, not the catalog
Her first pick was a make-sheet fundamentals course — pH, moisture, the numbers she'd been recording without fully trusting. "I'd been writing down the same three readings for a year and I couldn't have told you what a bad one looked like," she said. "I needed the why before I needed anything fancier." From there she mapped the rest of the year to specific weaknesses: a sensory evaluation course for the tasting notes she'd been avoiding writing down in detail, and a rind development course timed to a bloomy-rind wheel she'd been fighting with since fall.
The federation offers courses across a range of topics — from foundational make-sheet work through advanced affinage and export documentation — and the honest advice from members who've done this well is the same every time: pick based on your actual gap, not on what sounds most advanced. A course above your current problem teaches you vocabulary you can't yet use. A course aimed right at this month's failure teaches you something you'll use by Friday. That advice tracks with what broader industry training programs have been emphasizing too — a good course sequence layers science fundamentals under the advanced technique, rather than skipping straight to the advanced technique and hoping the fundamentals catch up on their own.
The harder piece, she told us, wasn't sitting through the material. It was going back to her own cave and actually applying what a course covered before the next course started, instead of collecting certificates and hoping the knowledge would settle in on its own. After the make-sheet course, she spent six weeks re-checking her own readings against what she'd learned before she let herself move on. "I could have just taken the next course right away," she said. "I don't think it would have stuck the same way."
The competition entry that came out of it
By late fall, the make-sheet numbers she'd finally learned to trust turned into a first competition entry — nothing that placed, she's quick to say, but a wheel she could explain in detail when a judge asked why it turned out the way it did. That, more than a ribbon, was the point of the year for her. "I could finally answer the question instead of guessing," she told us.
If a version of this resolution sounds like yours, the Education Committee maintains the current course calendar and can help you sequence a year the way she did — starting from what you don't yet trust in your own process, not from what looks impressive on paper. Course enrollment for the winter term opens through the member portal, and last year's course list plus current openings are there now. A syllabus built around your actual gaps costs the same as one built around ambition. It just works better.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.