We met Renata Cole at the registration table in Asheville this week, and she told us something that's stuck with us since. She runs the cheese counter at a small grocery outside a mid-sized Midwest city, and she's spent the last two years studying for her Certified Cheesemonger credential almost entirely by herself — no local study group, no coworkers who'd taken the exam before her, just a stack of notes and a lot of late nights after closing. This week was the first time she'd been in a room with other people who'd done the same thing.
That's a more common story than you'd think, and it's part of why we wanted to write about her instead of one of our longer-tenured members this week. The last two years pushed a lot of learning into a solitary format by necessity — recorded webinars, self-paced modules, exams you sat for alone at a kitchen table. It worked, in the sense that our certification numbers held up through 2020 and 2021 better than almost anything else we track. But something gets lost when nobody around you is doing the same hard thing at the same time, and Renata's case makes that loss concrete.
Two years of studying, then a hallway
She told us the hardest part wasn't the material — it was not knowing whether the way she was studying actually worked until exam day arrived. Affinage terminology, mold identification, pairing theory: she could learn all of it from a book, but she had no one to ask "does this make sense to you too?" That changed the moment she walked into this week's Certified Cheesemonger review session, where she said the room was full of people nodding at the exact same confusing subpoints she'd wrestled with alone. She passed her exam eight months ago. She still drove eight hours to be in that room.
We think that's worth sitting with as we plan next year's programming. A credential path built entirely around solo study is efficient, but efficiency isn't the only thing that keeps people engaged with their trade. The counter staff and assistant cheesemakers earning credentials right now are disproportionately newer to the industry, often working in smaller shops without a mentor down the hall, and they are exactly the members who benefit most from a room like the one Renata found this week — and exactly the members least likely to have the travel budget to get there easily.
If that's your situation too — studying for Cheese Foundations, Certified Cheesemonger, or any of our other credentials without a study partner nearby — talk to us. The Education Committee has been informally matching members for study pairs over email for a couple of years, but we haven't publicized it well, and Renata's story is a good reminder that we should. It costs us nothing to introduce two members working through the same material, and based on what we heard this week, it might matter more than the modules themselves.
Congratulations, Renata, on the credential, and on making the drive. We hope it was worth it.
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.