Most Octobers, our spotlight subject is deciding what to do about the case. This one is deciding what to do about the people standing in front of it. A cheesemonger at a regional specialty shop earned her Certified Cheesemonger credential this past spring, after two years working the counter, and this fall she's the one running training for the two seasonal hires the shop brings on every November through January.
"Nobody trained me the way I'm trying to train them," she told us. "I learned by getting corrected in front of customers, which works eventually, but it's a rough way to start a job." She's spent the past few weeks building something closer to an actual onboarding sequence: a first week focused entirely on handling and wrapping, a second on the ten or so cheeses the shop sells the most of, and only after that any real customer-facing time on the floor.
What the credential actually changed
Certified Cheesemonger isn't a requirement for working a counter, and plenty of good mongers never pursue it. What it gave her, she says, wasn't new hands-on skill so much as a vocabulary for explaining what she already knew how to do. "Before the credential, I could tell you a cheese was good. After it, I could tell you why — moisture, rind type, what the affinage actually did to it — in a way a customer could follow in fifteen seconds standing at the case." That's turned out to be the most transferable part of the training she's now passing on: not a list of cheeses to memorize, but a habit of describing a wedge in two sentences that a first-time customer can actually use to decide.
Holiday counter work is widely regarded as the hardest stretch of the job to learn on, with volume, gift-basket requests, and unfamiliar customers all landing at once, and shops that skip real onboarding tend to lose seasonal hires fast once the rush hits. She's betting that a slower first two weeks in October will pay for itself in a seasonal hire who's still there, and still useful, come the second week of December.
What she'd tell another member doing this
Her advice for members training seasonal staff this year is blunt: don't let a new hire's first customer interaction happen on their busiest possible day. "Give them their bad day early, when the shop is slow enough that a wrong answer doesn't cost you a sale," she said. "By the time it's actually busy, they've already made the mistakes that matter." She's also started keeping a one-page cheat sheet — not a full binder, just the ten cheeses and the two sentences each one needs — which she says has done more for a new hire's first week than any of the longer training documents the shop tried in past years.
If you're building out seasonal training of your own, the Certified Cheesemonger credential pathway includes a module on exactly this kind of counter communication, and the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a short list of members willing to share their own onboarding materials with anyone building a program from scratch this fall.
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.