I just came back from a week-long extensive course at Texas A and M. It was very informative and I’ve learned a ton.

Throughout my career, I’ve taken specialty courses to improve my education and fill in the knowledge gaps. At my first job in Leclerc, they sent me to a week-long cracker training course to help me learn how to set up a cracker production line. At Isagenix, I asked to go to this protein bar training course and now at Better Meat, I went and learned about how extrusion works.

With these three different subjects such as crackers, protein bars, and extrusion, there were different points in my career where I was either considered a novice or an expert, but overall, I find these courses really useful to enhance one’s technical knowledge. With only 20-30 people per year in the course, you do have a huge advantage in your skillset when you take these courses.

Yet what is the return on investment of a course? These courses are generally $100 and sometimes $1000’s of dollars. Like expos and conferences, the benefits lie on how you process the information. If you’re engaged, ask questions and perhaps have had a few years of experience with it, then courses really give you a solid foundation in terms of becoming a subject matter expert.

Filling Up Knowledge Gaps

In my four years of working in the industry, I’ve learned about bars and extrusion in every job I’ve done. With four years of just “thrown into the fray” training, how do I know that I’m doing the right thing?

What’s really nice about specialty courses is that you are interacting with people ranging from professors who just focus on starches, engineers who work on the machines, and everyone in between. Every subject in a specialty course is taught by an expert at either a specific subject or company that focuses on the subject.

Not only that, but the benefits of talking with colleagues who are going to this course the same reason you are is also extremely beneficial.

What this does is allows you to confirm prior knowledge your company taught you and also allows you to learn other techniques to do your job better.

One big example is in both the protein bar and extrusion course, they talk a lot about protein functionality but in Isagenix, it took a lot of time to figure out what I was looking for in terms of choosing what protein I wanted to use. How could I test the functionality? Some companies had very shoddy methods. One, in particular, dubbed a test “the pancake test” to validate water retention.

You can pick up certain methods that may or may not be your style when you do these courses. One, for example, is when you’re extruding plant-based meat, you need a protein that gels well. How can we test it before the extruder? Apparently, your protein supplier knows the answer.

Another example is on what syrups to use for bar manufacturing. Why doesn’t date paste stick as well as corn syrup? Both have different properties and it’s actually a ratio that needs to be achieved to get things to stick to bits properly. Almonds can’t stick to syrup as well as rice crispies can, for instance.

These little small things really don’t matter too much in terms of general knowledge, but when you are nose deep into a food subject, small questions like these free up a lot of headaches and that alone might be worth the cost.

Expert Confirmation

The Texas A and M course is 26 years old and the Protein Bar course was 2 years old, but the industry keeps on changing so every year, you’ll learn the most cutting-edge technology. You also get a certificate at the end.

I wouldn’t treat a course certificate like a bachelors degree, but saying you went to a course gives you some respect.

I use the term Subject Matter Expert in a previous article and to validate that you are indeed a subject matter expert, you should know 80% of the content being talked about, and the 20% of the content should be something new. In general, the 20% of the content that you learn that’s new should be considered things that you need to ask to the experts teaching the class.

Yet I do believe a certain type of person should be in these courses. I don’t recommend account managers going, though they do a great job trying to sell the participants stuff, but there is a wide range of people who are best fit for courses like these. Food Technologists, Food Engineers, and Purchasing people will actually get the best value in this course. There are blips of knowledge on things like Quality Assurance and Safety, but nothing very impactful for them.

Business

There are many business opportunities that can happen within the course. Not only will you probably make friends with your classmates, but also you will have potential opportunities to connect with the lecturers of the course to help you relieve your frustrations.

This is probably the biggest return on investment in a course: the potential to forge new business relations to help you in your work.

In the extrusion course, multiple connections were made that could potentially improve our business.

1. Befriend a guy who requested a sample of our product to use in his product
2. Looking into a copacker who can do our product and met the person in charge of said copacker
3. Talking to the people who build the machines to see if we can collaborate.

Forging these connections of course, is a gamble but most business deals often are. However, because most business deals happen from strong connections, courses are a great place to start.

Courses are also a great platform to interact with experts because of the price barrier (everyone paid the same, high price to get here) and the knowledge barrier (I’m probably here to learn something). These two types of purposes make it much easier to forge business relationships.

So the next time you ask your boss about attending this course, you really have to push the potential. The potential of learning new things, of becoming an expert, and finding solutions to push your company forward.