Hiring has been a strange conversation among members this year. A few creameries have had to let people go as feed and energy costs squeeze already-thin margins; a few others, mostly on the retail and wholesale side, still can't find a qualified assistant cheesemaker and are hiring straight out of a certificate cohort. Both of those are true in the federation at the same time, which is exactly why we're pointing members toward next month's apprenticeship-building webinar, running March 12, virtual, and free to attend.
What the session is for
This isn't a session about whether to hire — it's about how to structure the learning once someone's in the door. A lot of small creameries run apprenticeships informally: a new hire shadows the head cheesemaker for a few months and picks things up by watching. That works, to a point, but it also means nothing is written down, nothing is consistent between hires, and nothing maps cleanly to a credential your apprentice could actually use later, like the Cheese Foundations Certificate or the counter-side monger credential.
The webinar walks through building a lightweight apprenticeship structure — what to document, how to pace it against coursework, and how to give a new hire something that looks like a real career path rather than just a job. It's aimed squarely at operations under a dozen people, which is most of our membership, rather than at large dairy operations building multi-year registered programs with formal on-the-job hour requirements. Our members mostly don't have the staff to run something that heavy, and don't need to.
Why now, specifically
If your creamery is one of the ones under real cost pressure this year, an apprenticeship structure is also a retention tool, not just an onboarding one. A new hire who can see a credential path and a skills ladder is a lot less likely to leave for the first slightly higher offer down the road. If your creamery is one of the ones struggling to hire, the same structure makes you a more attractive place to apply in the first place — candidates coming out of our courses ask about this more than they used to, and a written path is a real answer instead of a shrug.
Either way, an hour on March 12 is a reasonable trade for a structure you'd otherwise build from scratch, badly, under deadline pressure the next time you need to hire. We'd also rather you build it now, while you have some room to think, than in the middle of a hiring crunch when every decision gets rushed.
Registration is open now through the events calendar; it's free, virtual, and recorded for members who can't make the live session. If your creamery has already built something like this informally, we'd also welcome you as a voice in the discussion — the Membership & Outreach Committee is collecting a few working examples to share alongside the formal material, and a short write-up of what's worked for you is worth more to another member than a polished case study would be.
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.