Conception’s Director of Customer Success and Product Development Cassie Hilder to Take Up Steering Committee Advisory Role for Cultivation Program
VENTURA, Calif. and SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Green Flower and recently established GF Institute (GFI) proudly announce another Founding Member brand is joining its ranks, with Conception Nurseries and its Director of Customer Success and Product Development, Cassie Hilder, to represent the brand on GFI’s inaugural Steering Committee advisory group.
“Many of the leading growers in California and Oregon depend on Conception Nurseries—and their groundbreaking work on tissue culture cannabis clones makes them a thought leader that is right at home as a GF Institute Founding Member,” said Max Simon, CEO and Co-Founder of Green Flower. “GFI will address many of the issues in the cannabis workforce and help employers like Conception Nurseries train and equip their employees with the necessary skills, knowledge, and credibility they need to succeed.”
Cassie Hilder from Conception Nurseries had more to say on the subject: “The GF Institute Standardized Credential program helps new cannabis employees better understand and master their job-specific responsibilities and deliver positive results with increasing accuracy and confidence. By leveraging the best practices available in each job role, licensed cannabis operators and managers can shift their focus back to driving productivity and optimizing standard operating procedures.”
The cannabis industry — and cultivation teams in particular — are under increasing amounts of pressure to meet profitability targets, leaving many employers looking to recruit talent from other industries. Many of these new recruits, however, lack any sense of formalized cannabis knowledge they can rely on when they first enter the space, leading many to feel frustrated, burned out, overlooked, or simply overwhelmed.
As a result of this onboarding environment, the cannabis industry continues to face a host of painful, costly barriers to profitability that each stem from a lack of understanding the impact a rigorous, standards-based training program has on the employee experience. With the creation of GF Institute, cannabis employers can fight turnover, poor customer service, unsafe products, costly compliance errors, and much more utilizing standardized cannabis curricula to help employees better understand how their individual responsibilities impact the larger organization.
“As we have seen in other industries who successfully deployed this model to positively impact workforce development and employee engagement, well-trained employees bring professionalism, industry-adopted credentials bring credibility, and equity is all about making sure education — historically viewed as a powerful equalizing force — reaches and impacts the people who need it most,” said Gil Christie, GF Institute’s inaugural chairman.
GFI is launching with three credentials, available today, designed to focus on the largest sectors of people growth in cannabis:
- Dispensary Associate Certificate (DAC)
- Cultivation Technician Certificate (CTC)
- Manufacturing Agent Certificate (MAC)
Each credential program is available entirely online, consists of 2 units with summative assessments at the end of each unit, and will require learners to dedicate 12-16 hours of time to completing the course requirements. Each learner who completes a GFI cannabis credential program will earn a certificate of achievement officially commemorating their program completion, as well as both digital and physical badges that represent their accomplishments and distinguish individuals as dedicated cannabis professionals to co-workers, customers, and the general public.
GF Institute invites every licensed cannabis operator across the U.S.to become Founding Members of GFI. To encourage industry-wide adoption of the professional credential program, GF Institute is offering Founding Member applicants a limited time offer that includes the professional credentials at no extra cost as part of a standard Green Flower enterprise learning and development licensing agreement. The deadline for applicants to qualify for this special pricing deal is December 31, 2021.
For more information on GF Institute or the GFI Cannabis Credential program, please visit gfinstitute.org and download the complete program guide, including course syllabus documentation and answers to frequently asked questions.
About Green Flower:
Founded in 2014, Green Flower is the industry leader in cannabis education, empowering thousands of consumers, regulators, and professionals with the knowledge they need to succeed in the emerging cannabis industry today.
Green Flower’s content and technology platform powers the cannabis programs of top universities and colleges across the country, provides customized learning and compliance solutions for cannabis businesses of all sizes, and equips individuals with the skills and credentials necessary to make an impact in the modern cannabis industry.
ABOUT CONCEPTION NURSERIES
Conception Nurseries, the world’s largest micropropagation lab, brings proven agricultural technology to cannabis with tissue culture technology (micropropagation). To date, cannabis cultivators have been dependent on mother plants to produce clones – resulting in inconsistent harvests with diluted and uncontrollable traits. Tissue culture technology, which is widely used in industrial agriculture to address the exact problems cannabis cultivators face today, allows Conception to quickly mass-produce identical, disease-free plantlets with customized and consistent characteristics. This reduces cultivators’ operational risks and costs while increasing their revenues and delivering a dependable end-user experience. For more information, visit conceptionnurseries.com. (CA license numbers CCL19-0004127 and C13-0000182-LIC)