Join Thursday’s apprenticeship webinar

If you've been putting off a decision about bringing on your first apprentice, this Thursday's webinar, "Apprenticeship Programmes 2019," is built for exactly that stage of the question. It's free, it's virtual, and it runs about an hour with time at the end for members to ask about their own situation.

We've heard the same hesitation from a lot of small producers over the past year: an apprentice sounds useful in theory, but nobody's sure what a program is actually supposed to include beyond "someone follows you around the make room." Thursday's session walks through what other member creameries have used successfully — a written learning plan, a rough timeline for what an apprentice should be doing at three months versus nine, and who on your team needs to sign off on progress. None of it requires a formal registered-apprenticeship filing to be useful; several members run an informal version of the same structure and have found it cuts down on the "wait, what am I supposed to be teaching them today" problem in the first few weeks.

Part of why this topic is on the calendar now is that federal grant money aimed at expanding apprenticeship models into industries that haven't traditionally used them has been moving this year, with sector after sector — manufacturing, transportation, health care, and a handful of skilled trades — building out registered programs of their own. Food and dairy production hasn't been a major target of that funding so far, but a few member creameries have asked whether a registered apprenticeship is worth pursuing versus the informal version most of us already run. Thursday's session won't settle that question for you, but it'll at least frame it: a registered program brings paperwork, a state filing, and access to a small set of supports; an informal one brings flexibility and almost none of the overhead. Most members on a single vat and a handful of staff are better served starting informal and formalizing later if it makes sense.

What the session won't cover

This isn't a labor-law or wage-and-hour briefing, and we're not going to pretend otherwise on the call. If your apprenticeship question is really a payroll or classification question, that's a conversation for your own counsel or accountant, not a federation webinar. What Thursday will cover is the craft and mentorship side: how to sequence what a newcomer learns, how to know when they're ready for more responsibility at the vat, and how a handful of member creameries structure the relationship so it doesn't quietly turn into unpaid labor with a nicer name.

It also won't cover recruiting — where to find someone in the first place. That's a real gap, and one we hear about often enough that it may end up as its own session later this year. For now, most members tell us their best apprentices have come through a course roster rather than a job posting; if you've taught or hosted a workshop through the federation, you already have a short list of people who showed real curiosity in the room.

Summer timing matters here too. Member creameries that held off on hiring during the slower months are busy again now that the cheese case has firmed up, and short-staffed at exactly the wrong moment. If that's your situation, an apprentice can be the fastest path to a second set of trained hands, but only if you've thought through what they need to learn and in what order — winging it costs you more supervision time in the first month than a half-hour of planning would have.

How to join

The webinar is open to all members at no charge; a link went out in this week's member email, and it's also posted on the events page. If you're weighing whether to bring on help for next season and haven't settled on a shape for it, this is a low-commitment way to hear what's actually worked for other small operations before you write anything down. Bring a question — the last twenty minutes are yours, and if you can't make it live, a recording will go out to members who register in advance.

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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.