Food safety is one of the most critical roles for food producers; it's also one of the hardest to staff. The job is high-engagement and high-stress, requires a lifetime of continuing education, and is being pursued by fewer and fewer young people.
When manufacturers need to fill a food safety role, they must find, hire, and onboard a candidate incredibly quickly. The risk and cost of leaving the role vacant is simply too high:
- Food safety incidents can harm public health.
- Failure to meet regulatory and compliance requirements can lead to fines and expensive remediation.
- Production output can slow down as new hires work through their onboarding.
- Producers can miss expansion and growth targets.
Those are just the direct and immediate considerations — but taking too long to onboard (or not onboarding thoroughly enough) can also lead to lower employee satisfaction, higher burnout, and high turnover in food safety roles as existing team members are left to shoulder the burden. It pays to get food safety teams in, onboarded, trained, and ready to hit the ground running as quickly as possible. The question is: How?
The Importance of Quick Food Safety Onboarding
In an ideal world, food producers would have all the time they need to bring in and properly train new food safety talent. In the real world, though, most facilities need their new food safety personnel onboarded and ready to go yesterday. The drivers for this need for speed are twofold: FDA regulations and the timing of when most new food safety personnel are hired.
Shifting FDA Regulations
Sometimes, new food safety positions are created all at once by the regulatory mandate. That was the case with the FDA's Final Rule for Preventive Controls for Human Food, codified in 21 CFR Part 117. Passed in 2015 and going into effect mostly in 2016, the rule required all facilities to have a Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI) on staff. Suddenly, every facility was scrambling to either send someone through PCQI training or hire someone with existing PCQI training, all at the same time. And even under normal circumstances, the BLS projects an 8% increase in the need for food-safety-related employees in the next decade.
Most regulatory changes aren't quite as impactful, but just the sheer number of changes on the horizon at any given time means facilities need all hands on deck to prepare for the next rule or change. Taking too long to onboard a new critical role means facilities run the risk of falling behind on preparations, thereby not being ready when enforcement begins.
Expansion and Growth
The other big event that usually triggers the need to hire a new food safety person is expansion. Because of 21 CFR Part 117 mentioned above, opening a new plant means bringing on a new PCQI, and operations must be delayed until that new PCQI is in and ready to start.
Delaying the start of operations can cost thousands or tens of thousands per day. Relying on a PCQI who isn't fully onboarded can alleviate some of that initial burden, but it can also lead to other problems like food safety lapses or a generally longer and slower production ramp-up. It may be tempting to accelerate food safety employee training and onboarding and just get a warm body in, but speed at the expense of food safety will ultimately cost far more down the line than taking the time upfront.
Speeding Up the Food Safety Onboarding Process Without Sacrificing Food Safety
Improving the onboarding process for maximum speed and maximum efficiency is possible. Doing so without sacrificing a focus on food safety is much more challenging.
Prepare for Onboarding Early
For a new hire, onboarding might not start until their first day at the facility, but for you, it should start long before you even decide to hire. Early preparation not only makes the process run much faster and smoother, but also increases employee satisfaction (for current employees and new hires) and builds a much more competent and thorough food safety team. Consider:
- Identifying onboarding needs early. This can include identifying general food safety skills, as well as the specific skills necessary to excel in the role at a given facility. These specifics can include knowledge of the equipment in use at the facility, specialized testing and monitoring tools and protocols, and any peculiarities of your facility's layout, process, hygiene requirements, or needs. Pro tip: Creating a structured skills matrix can help define these needs by role.
- In addition to facility-specific needs, don't forget to plan for the general skills new hires will need to be trained on. These can include:
- FSPCA Preventive Controls for Human Food training
- HAACP training
- PCQI training
- Make sure documentation exists, is accessible, and is clear. Check that new hires can easily find and understand all the documentation you might need for food safety employee training, especially for any onboarding processes that can be self-directed in case a dedicated trainer isn’t available.
- In addition to your specific materials and documentation, start a library of external training resources that you can easily add to any time someone on your team finds a new one.
- Determine your level of onboarding availability. Some facilities might have plenty of downtime to train a rookie PCQI from the ground up. Most, though, operate at 100% capacity 100% of the time. Identify your level of availability for onboarding and training and use that to inform the hiring requirements. Alternatively, consider whether you'll need to bring in a partner like AIB International to assist you with food safety employee training and onboarding.
- Don't forget the soft skills. With technical roles, it's easy to focus on technical skills and onboarding, but don't ignore the soft skills requirements. Things like company culture might seem trivial, but understanding how to navigate your organization will go a long way toward helping new hires get up to speed quickly.
- Establish a feedback loop. After each onboarding cycle, gather feedback from new hires and trainers to evaluate the strength and weakness points of the process and help improve it over time.
Streamline Your Training
"Streamlining" might carry connotations of cutting things out, but it doesn't have to. For onboarding and food safety employee training, streamlining actually means finding ways to do more in less time. This can include:
- Finding opportunities for self-directed learning. Often, the hardest part of optimizing training is finding time with a trainer. Look for any opportunity to let new hires self-direct their training or otherwise complete training materials on their own time and without the need for supervision. Any onboarding that new hires can complete on their own frees up time for existing personnel. Just be sure that self-directed content is validated and include checkpoints to confirm new hires’ understanding of the material.
- Focusing on parallelization and multitasking. Not all training and onboarding needs to take place in isolation. Find ways to combine the trainer's standard duties with the act of onboarding. For example, instead of setting aside time for a dedicated facility walkthrough, a new hire can shadow your current PCQI on a process or facility audit to get the lay of the land while also learning how your audit process works and freeing the trainer to accomplish multiple tasks concurrently. Additionally, consider rotating new hires across departments to expose them to cross-functional food safety responsibilities.
- Build a plan and refine it often. Having a dedicated food safety training plan before onboarding can make the onboarding process much faster. After every onboarding, take some time to audit the process and review what went well and what didn't to make the next one even better.
- Use technology to make learning more functional. Systems like e-learning and LMSes make your training faster, more effective, and less burdensome for the trainer. They can also offer features that help in course design and lesson planning, allowing you to build a more effective training program.
- Decentralize training. Not everything has to be learned all at once. Instead of large, regularly scheduled food safety employee training sessions, consider adding more decentralized options like direct mentorship, on-demand refresher courses, and impromptu training and workshops as needed. Leveraging train-the-trainer models can also help build a broader internal knowledge base, enabling senior team members to guide new hires.
Getting Food Safety Onboarding Right, and Fast
They say that you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. The same is true for onboarding: While new hires can pick up skills after they’re hired, the culture and attitude they learn during their onboarding will shape the kind of food safety employee they ultimately are for you. That's why getting it right is so important.
But getting it right and making it fast don't have to be at odds. Providing your food safety team with better training, equipment, resources, and support can mean much faster onboardings and much safer food — with more efficiency, fewer costs, and less risk.
If you need help creating a fast, effective food safety onboarding plan, contact AIB International to learn about our Food Safety Program Development services. Or consider using our Assign an Expert service to place a highly skilled food safety professional directly into your organization.
