She'd managed a front-of-house team for eleven years before a slow 2020 pushed her out of restaurants entirely. She joined the federation last year mostly to figure out whether cheesemaking was a real career option or just something she liked talking to a supplier about. By this spring she was running the make room for a small creamery three days a week and studying for her Food Safety & HACCP Certificate on the other two.
"I didn't have the option of shadowing anyone in person for a long stretch of last year, so the online courses were the whole path in," she told us. She worked through Milk Quality & Herd Health first, then Sensory Foundations, taking them a few weeks apart rather than back to back so she could actually practice what each one covered before starting the next. That pacing, she says, mattered more than which course came first. "I wasn't trying to collect certificates. I wanted to be able to taste a wheel and say something specific about what went wrong with it, and that takes repetition, not just watching a lecture."
What the numbers behind her look like
She's not unusual this year. Course enrollment across the federation has run well above where it sat before 2020, even as event registration is only now starting to recover, and a meaningful share of that growth is exactly this profile: someone changing careers or filling a gap year with structured coursework instead of waiting for in-person options to come back. Retention among members who started this way has held up better than we expected going into last year — once someone's built a study habit around the material, a return to in-person sessions tends to add to it rather than replace it.
Programs elsewhere in the dairy world moved the same direction for the same reason. When in-person short courses stopped being an option, extension programs that had run hands-on cheesemaking workshops for decades rebuilt them as online sequences almost overnight, and a lot of those programs found that the online version reached people who never would have traveled for the in-person one. We've seen the same pattern in our own numbers: a rural member three hours from the nearest workshop city is far more likely to finish an online course than to make three trips for an in-person series, simply because the online version doesn't ask them to give up a working day and a tank of gas each time.
She's planning to sit for her HACCP certificate this fall and has already registered for a fall Alpine-style affinage workshop, which will be her first in-person federation event. "I'm a little nervous about it, honestly," she said. "A screen has been forgiving in a way a room full of people who've done this for twenty years won't be." We don't think that's the right way to bet — a make room doesn't care how someone learned to read a curd, only whether they can — but we understand the nerves. Plenty of members who came up the traditional way, apprenticing under someone for a season before touching a vat alone, will tell you their first weeks were just as unsteady.
If you're weighing whether to start somewhere in the middle of a career change, her advice was blunt: pick one course, finish it before adding a second, and don't wait for a perfect stretch of free time to start, because one probably isn't coming. The course catalog on the member portal is a reasonable place to start deciding which one goes first, and the Education Committee is a fair place to ask if you're not sure whether your background is enough of a foothold to begin.
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.