As Regulatory Oversight Grows, Career Development in Food Safety Shifts

More than 90% of food safety inspections in U.S. food manufacturing and distribution establishments are carried out by state and local agencies, yet there has been no mandatory training and no career-spanning, standards-based training curriculum for food safety professionals in these agencies, according to the IFPTI.

The institute aims to implement a national food safety training system and develop certification to help ensure that the performance of food safety professionals is comparable and competent at all levels, including local, state, national, and international. To do this, the IFPTI has designed a curriculum framework that identifies four levels in food safety careers: entry level, journey level, technical specialists, and leadership.

This division helps to create a career pathway for those who aspire to move up in their professions. Training courses can be mapped to the framework, identifying them as appropriate for entry level, journey level, and so on, thereby eliminating the hit-or-miss nature of choosing courses, Wojtala said. Time for personnel development is a limited commodity, so managers must make the most of it, he said.

“Program managers and supervisors who make decisions about training staff now can do it more wisely,” he said. “By having this career pathway and sequencing, it really eliminates a lot of guesswork, and we’ve seen that benefit in people not spending money and wasting time for courses that are not appropriate for the audience or are not at the right level.”

The framework is also helping colleges and universities align their educational programs with the career pathways, Wojtala mentioned.

“Before these young people even get into their careers, they can start aligning with some of these professions and careers, so it really provides a pathway right from their education into their careers, and then [as they] continue training,” he said.

Designing Training

Education and training are two different things, Wojtala emphasized, and it is important to distinguish the two in designing—and choosing—a course for career advancement. The technologies used in training must be appropriate to the subject matter, he said.

“We’ve all sat through three days of a course that we probably could have taken online or read in a book,” he said. “In a face-to-face course, you want to have a lot of hands-on and observation: for example, teaching someone how to take a food sample. You want an instructor there who can give feedback or do an assessment of your technique—whereas the information about that sample could be read online, so you save a lot of time.”

The ways young professionals learn also seem to be changing, said Roberson of Publix.

“Nothing will ever replace the watch-me, follow-me, show-me type of training,” he said, “but as we look to the next generation, how do our young people learn best? We’re trying to figure out how we can leverage technology, be it tablet technology or different gaming systems, to provide more interactive training with a virtual reality-type environment.”

With the aim of identifying and developing tomorrow’s leaders, the IFPTI now offers an accredited fellowship in food protection for experienced food regulatory professionals (journey and technical levels). The highly selective program comprises three week-long programs in Battle Creek, capped by a trip to the annual AFDO meeting, where final posters and projects are presented.

“We’ve had so much success with this program on the regulatory side that we want to expand it and have an industry fellowship program that intersects with the regulatory program so that we have people training together and learning together, these future leaders,” Wojtala said.