Ask somebody outside the cheese sector what jobs exist in cheese and they might come up with cheesemaker or cheesemonger. Perhaps they will think of somebody working behind the counter in a farm shop or making cheese in a dairy.
But the sector employs people in a much wider range of roles.
There are affineurs, production teams, dairy technologists, quality and food safety specialists, warehouse and distribution teams, salespeople, marketers, engineers, ecommerce teams, educators, event organisers and plenty more.
The problem is that many of those careers aren’t particularly easy to see from the outside.
Even somebody who loves cheese and would genuinely consider working in the sector might not know where to start looking, what different roles involve or how one job could eventually lead to another.
That feels like an opportunity worth exploring.
Finding cheese jobs shouldn’t depend on already knowing the cheese world
If you already work in cheese, you probably know some of the businesses, people and organisations worth following. You may hear about vacancies through colleagues, social media, industry contacts or simply knowing who is likely to be recruiting.
Someone trying to get into the sector doesn’t have those connections.
They might search one of the big recruitment websites and occasionally stumble across a relevant vacancy. They might visit the websites of individual cheesemakers or retailers. They might spot something on LinkedIn or Instagram. But there isn’t always an obvious place to start.
That matters because the people who could make brilliant future cheesemakers, mongers, salespeople, educators or production specialists aren’t necessarily already following cheese businesses online.
If opportunities are difficult to discover, some of those people will simply never realise they exist.
Employers have the same problem from the other side
Recruitment isn’t always easy for cheese businesses either, particularly smaller employers.
A vacancy on your own website is useful, but only if enough potential candidates find it. Posting it on social media can help, although the people who see it are often customers and existing followers rather than people actively looking for work.
General recruitment platforms can reach large audiences, but they aren’t specifically built around the cheese sector. A small independent cheesemaker may also be competing for attention alongside thousands of completely unrelated vacancies.
That leaves an interesting question. Could cheese businesses get more from their own recruitment activity if there were better ways to connect and distribute those opportunities across the sector?
What if we made cheese jobs easier to find together?
One obvious starting point is a dedicated place for cheese jobs.
We’ve already begun developing the Cheese Jobs platform as a way to bring relevant vacancies together. The basic idea is straightforward: give people who want to work in cheese somewhere useful to look, while giving employers another route to reach people who are genuinely interested in the sector.
But a job board on its own only solves part of the problem. The more interesting opportunity is what could sit around it.
Someone browsing a vacancy for an affineur might want to understand what an affineur actually does. A person interested in cheesemaking might want to know what training would help them get started. A cheesemonger thinking about their next move might want to understand what other careers their knowledge and experience could lead to.
That starts turning a list of jobs into something much more useful.
Publish once, reach further
There is also an opportunity to make things easier for employers. Ideally, businesses shouldn’t have to choose between publishing a vacancy on their own website and using a sector-wide jobs platform. Their own website should still be an important part of the recruitment journey.
For businesses using WordPress, one idea we’re exploring is a simple cheese jobs plugin that gives employers a sensible structure for publishing vacancies on their own sites.
A good vacancy might include:
- Job title and location
- Salary or salary range
- Employment type
- Working pattern
- Closing date
- A clear description of the role
- Skills and experience needed
- Information about the employer
- How to apply
The interesting bit is what could happen next. Could that vacancy also be submitted to a wider Cheese Jobs platform without the employer having to recreate the whole advert?
The principle would be simple: create once, publish on your own website, then distribute it further. That could help smaller employers get more reach while keeping their own website at the centre of the process.
A career is bigger than the next vacancy
If we really want more people to consider careers in cheese, simply advertising available jobs isn’t enough. We also need to make the different routes through the sector easier to understand.
What does a cheesemaker actually do day to day? How does somebody become a cheesemonger? What does working in cheese quality or food safety involve? Can retail experience lead into buying, wholesale, education or production? What skills are employers looking for?
There is an opportunity to build useful career information around roles such as:
- Cheesemaking and production
- Cheesemongering and retail
- Affinage
- Quality and food safety
- Technical and engineering roles
- Wholesale and distribution
- Sales and account management
- Cheese education and training
- Events and experiences
- Marketing and ecommerce
That information could help somebody decide whether a particular career is right for them before a suitable vacancy even appears. It could also help people already working in cheese see that their current role doesn’t have to be the end of the road.
Jobs and training should be easier to connect
Careers and skills are closely linked, but they can sometimes feel like separate worlds. A person sees a job they would love to do, but they don’t know whether they have the right experience. An employer repeatedly struggles to recruit people with a particular skill. A training provider runs exactly the programme somebody needs, but the connection between the course and the career opportunity isn’t obvious.
There may be a useful role for better connections between employment and learning. That doesn’t mean trying to replace the organisations already doing good work in training, qualifications, apprenticeships or professional development. The more useful role may be helping people discover what is already available and understand where it could take them.
Over time, a careers platform might help connect vacancies with relevant training, qualifications, workshops and skills guidance so somebody can see not just where the jobs are, but also how they could become ready for them.
Could we help more young people discover cheese careers?
There is also a bigger visibility challenge. Someone leaving school, college or university is unlikely to have a clear picture of the range of careers available in cheese unless they already have a connection to the sector.
The same is true for people considering a career change. Yet cheese combines food production, science, agriculture, retail, hospitality, logistics, engineering, sales, marketing, education and craft. There are potentially interesting routes for people with very different interests and skills.
We should also learn from and support the organisations already encouraging new talent into the sector rather than trying to duplicate what they are doing. If there are good competitions, training programmes, development opportunities or initiatives already helping younger people build careers in cheese, perhaps the better question is how we can make them easier to discover and connect them with future employment.
Location matters too
Jobs are different from many of the other things people search for online because geography matters so much. Someone looking for work in Somerset might not be interested in vacancies hundreds of miles away. They may be much more likely to search for something like “cheese jobs in Somerset” than simply “cheese jobs”.
That raises another interesting possibility. Could regional cheese careers pages eventually bring together local vacancies, employers, training opportunities, career stories and other useful information?
Areas with strong cheesemaking or food production communities might start to become more visible as places to build a career, rather than simply places associated with particular cheeses.
Again, we don’t know yet how useful that would be, but it is the sort of thing a shared platform gives us the opportunity to explore.
Recruitment could tell us something about the sector too
There is another side benefit that may become increasingly useful. Every vacancy tells us something.
If the same roles keep appearing, that tells us where demand exists. If particular vacancies are repeatedly difficult to fill, that may point towards a skills shortage. If some parts of the country have lots of opportunities and others have very few, that tells us something too.
Over time, shared recruitment activity could help us start asking better questions:
- Which roles are hardest to recruit?
- Which skills are employers asking for most often?
- Where are vacancies concentrated?
- Which types of role attract the most interest?
- Where are entry-level opportunities available?
- Are particular skills shortages becoming more common?
- What training might employers need more of?
We shouldn’t pretend a new jobs platform can answer those questions immediately. It can’t. But if enough employers and candidates use it, recruitment activity could eventually become a useful source of insight instead of disappearing each time a vacancy closes.
The bit we need help with
As with most ideas we explore through The Cheese Network, we’d rather shape this around real needs than decide everything ourselves. We’d particularly like to understand how employers, people working in cheese, training providers and potential candidates experience recruitment today.
Some of the things we’d like to learn include:
- How do you currently recruit?
- Which roles are hardest to fill?
- Where do people currently look for cheese jobs?
- What stops smaller employers advertising vacancies effectively?
- What information should every cheese vacancy include?
- Would employers use a simple recruitment plugin on their own website?
- Would automatic distribution to a wider cheese jobs platform be useful?
- What career information is currently difficult to find?
- How could training and employment opportunities connect more naturally?
- What existing careers and skills initiatives should we be supporting rather than duplicating?
The answers are likely to vary across cheesemakers, mongers, wholesalers, educators and other employers. That is fine. What we are particularly interested in are the problems that keep coming up.
Could we make cheese a more visible place to build a career?
The first practical step is relatively straightforward: build a useful place for people to find cheese jobs and make it easier for employers to publish them. But there is potentially a much bigger idea behind it.
Could we make the range of careers in cheese easier to discover? Could we help people understand how to get started and where they could progress? Could smaller employers reach stronger candidates by sharing some of the recruitment infrastructure? Could training providers connect more naturally with future learners? Could we learn more about the skills the sector will need next?
We don’t know exactly where all of this will lead yet, and we don’t need to. The important thing is to start with something useful, listen to the people using it and build from there.
If you recruit people into cheese, work in the sector, provide training, are looking for your next role or are simply interested in how we attract the next generation of cheese people, we’d like to hear from you.
What would make finding a job, recruiting someone or building a career in cheese easier?
