Route one
Behind a counter
The commonest start and the most underrated. A year on a good counter teaches you more about how cheese behaves than a year of reading, and it is the only entry role that regularly hires people with no experience at all.
Careers & volunteering
Ways into the trade, and ways further in.
Member vacancies, the apprenticeship strand, the volunteer roles that run the Federation, and the honest version of how people actually get hired in cheese.
Four routes in
Nobody in this trade took a straight path and the ones who claim otherwise are rounding. These are the four that come up over and over when members are asked how they started.
Route two
Into somebody’s make
Early mornings, heavy work, and the fastest possible education. Creameries hire for reliability before knowledge; the people who last are the ones who turn up at five for a year without being interesting about it.
Route three
Sideways from food science
Quality, laboratory and technical roles take people from dairy and food science programs directly. The gap to close is sensory: a lab result and a tasting note have to agree, and only one of them is taught at university.
Route four
Credential first
The Cheese Foundations Certificate is six weeks and gives you the vocabulary to be useful on day one. Most entry interviews are lost at the point where a candidate cannot describe what they are holding.
See the ladder →Member vacancies
Roles at member organizations go out in the Monday brief and are collected here. The board is open to anyone, member or not — a vacancy that only members can see is a vacancy that will not be filled, and the point is to get people into the trade rather than to reward being in it already.
What gets posted, in rough order of volume: counter and shop-floor roles, assistant makers, affineurs, quality and laboratory positions, wholesale and account roles, and every so often a creamery looking for the person who will eventually take it over.
What does not: anything without a stated pay range. The Membership Committee took that decision in 2024 after members asked for it, and it removed about a fifth of submissions in the first month. None of them came back to complain.
Registration and applications are not live on this demonstration site. Ask about anything on the board and it will be routed to the right member organization.
Posting a vacancy
Free for member organizations, on every tier, with no limit on how many. Non-members pay a modest fee that exists to keep recruitment-agency volume off the board rather than to make money.
Send the role, the location, the pay range and a contact to careers@morecheese.org. It goes into the next brief.
The apprenticeship strand
Built because creameries training their next maker asked for it. A webinar series on how to structure an apprenticeship, what to teach in what order, and what the trainee should be able to do by month six — plus a small fund that helps a member creamery carry an apprentice through a first season.
Both sides are welcome: creameries who want to train, and people who want to be trained. Dates are on the notice board.
Volunteer roles
The staff are small by design; most of the Federation’s work is done by members. Every role here is open to any member in good standing, and service counts toward reconfirming a credential.
Committee seat
Standards, Food Safety, Education, Events, Membership or Advocacy. Four to six remote meetings a year, three-year terms starting after the October conference, and real decisions rather than advisory ones.
Individual membership includes a seat.
Session moderator
Keep a conference session to time, keep the questions honest, and make sure the quiet person at the back gets asked. No preparation beyond reading the abstract; apply when the call for sessions opens.
Good first volunteer role.
Exam grader
Grade the written and sensory components of the Certified Cheese Professional exam. Needs the credential yourself and several years in the trade, and it is the role that most changes how people think about their own palate.
Panels rotate; nobody grades every sitting.
Competition judge
Judge blind, to the published category standard, on a panel that has to reconcile when it disagrees. Training is provided and required, and first-year judges sit alongside experienced ones rather than alone.
See the six categories.
Meetup host
Put six people in a room with something to taste. That is genuinely the whole job, and the regional calendar exists entirely because members do it. The Events team will find you the other members nearby.
No committee, no term, no paperwork.
Mentor an apprentice
Take one person through a season in your own make. What a maker knows is mostly undocumented and it leaves when they do, which is the quiet crisis in this trade and the reason the strand exists.
Support and structure provided.
Ask for any of these through the contact page or at memberservices@morecheese.org. The committees that need people are almost always the ones nobody thinks to ask about; if the one you want is full, someone will tell you which is not and why it might suit you better. Governance, terms and the annual election are covered in the careers and governance FAQ.
Working for the Federation
Five roles carry the day-to-day work: Executive Director, Membership Operations, Communications, Education Programs and Events. That is the whole staff, and it is deliberate — a larger office would do worse work than several hundred members on committees.
Vacancies here are rare and are posted on this page alongside member roles rather than in a separate portal. Speculative approaches are read; roles in a body this size tend to get built around the person rather than the other way round.
Write to careers@morecheese.org with what you would want to do. The about page describes what each role actually covers.
The thing members say moved their career
Asked what changed things for them, members name the credential ladder first and the cohort they came up with second — Brook, Meadow, Alpine or Birch, eighteen to twenty-four people who started and finished together and mostly still talk.
Nobody names a job advert. That is worth knowing if you are deciding where to put your first $170.
See the membership tiers