Missourians interested in careers in the cannabis industry can now earn a certificate in cannabis education.
Green Flower is a California-based training provider for the cannabis industry. It created a virtual cannabis curriculum program to help develop the cannabis workforce.
Max Simon, the CEO of Green Flower, said the company partners with universities and colleges across the country to “power those programs.”
“Missouri’s cannabis market is an indication of what happens when you open up legal, safe access to cannabis,” he said.
The Department of Health and Senior Services reported that more than $40 billion generated by Missouri’s adult use and medical marijuana programs has been transferred to the Missouri Veterans Commission since the cannabis program was formed in late 2018.
In June 2023, the department also reported Missouri monthly sales were nearly 10 times greater then other states that also legalized marijuana around the same time.
In Missouri, universities like Northwest Missouri State are offering the online course for certification.
The three main sectors of the program are cultivation, manufacturing and retail.
“These nine-week programs focus on helping people get the skills and the knowledge and the credibility they need to get jobs and careers in those sectors,” Simon said.
The cannabis retail program teaches about the products and interface with customers. Cannabis cultivation teaches people how to grow cannabis from seed to sale, and the extraction and product development program teaches people how to make things like gummies, tinctures and chocolates.
“The cannabis industry is surprisingly complex and very difficult,” Simon said. “If you don’t have thorough training or thorough experience in the legal regulated market, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and make mistakes.”
Hippos Cannabis Dispensary assistant manager Abraham Numerick said a lot of people apply to be budtenders, which is role similar to a bartender but for marijuana.
Numerick said Hippos requires a cannabis care training for all of its employees to make sure they can provide the right product for the right patient.
“There is a lot of benefits in some of the cannabis higher education programs,” he said. “While certificates are awesome and they look really good on anyone’s resume … (and) that might bump them to the top of the pile, we’ll still put them through our own Cannabis Care Team training to make sure all of our budtenders are receiving the same education.”
Numerick said Hippos usually looks for people who are eager to learn about the cannabis industry, as well as people who are approachable to make the business a “comfortable retail space.”
“If you don’t come from cannabis, this gives you the best way to get that education, have the knowledge you need, stand out from everyone else and give employers and other operators the confidence that they need to hire you,” Simon said. “It’s very competitive. I think that if someone is serious about working in the industry, it really will serve them to get a proper education to help them not only get the knowledge they need, but the credibility to stand out from everyone else.”
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