If you’re looking for work amid the pandemic and live in a legal state, the cannabis industry is hiring. New data published in the 2020 edition of the annual Marijuana Business Factbook reports the U.S. cannabis industry is expected to add almost 250,000 full-time jobs between 2020 and 2024.
New Jersey is another state on the cusp of adult-use legalization. With Governor Phil Murphy pushing hard for recreational approval, one state college is offering relevant classes to its students. This past semester, Stockton College began offering its students the opportunity to minor in cannabis studies. The move is believed to be the first in New Jersey and one of just a handful in the country. As of early October 2018, 30 students had been enrolled in the program.
Alicia Ashley works in what is essentially a weed factory. Her job is to roll joints by hand, run a label printer, and attach those labels to jars of cannabis flower, all while making sure the products look and smell appealing. Ashley works for Flow Kana, a cannabis processing and distribution company in Mendocino, California, that serves as a sort of clearinghouse for the crops from numerous small pot farms in the area.
David Dancer is a 48-year-old marketing executive who has worked for big brands like Charles Schwab and Teleflora. A year ago, he got a call from a recruiter for a different kind of company: MedMen, a cannabis retailer that has been called “the Apple Store of weed.” The opening was for a chief marketing officer. He took it.
Grace DeNoya is used to getting snickers when people learn she's majoring in marijuana.
"My friends make good-natured jokes about getting a degree in weed," said DeNoya, one of the first students in a new four-year degree program in medicinal plant chemistry at Northern Michigan University. "I say, 'No, it's a serious degree, a chemistry degree first and foremost. It's hard work. Organic chemistry is a bear.'"
In a new analysis of legal pot's jobs and pay scales, the marijuana head-hunting firm Vangst, which describes itself as the "Monster.com of the cannabis industry," reports that pot is hot. The company says it expects employment in the industry to more than double next year and that salaries at licensed pot businesses are up 18 percent this year.
Budtender. It's a clever term but what are their job responsibilities exactly? And what skills do you need to be successful? To find out, we caught up with Mallory Drew, a top-selling budtender for Lightshade, a high-end marijuana dispensary with six locations in Colorado.
Explain what a budtender does
It is a Budtender’s job to guide their customers and/or patients through consultations. We facilitate discussions about their needs, their experience with cannabis, their difficulties, and their lives. Then we help the customer find the right products for them.
As tech leaders once had to persuade promising grads hellbent on careers in traditional white collar fields, so too for those at the forefront of the legal weed trade. (And tech entrepreneurs weren't fighting nearly a century of prohibition.)
Kush Bottles operates in states where cannabis is legal, but even when marijuana goes legit in these states, the stigma remains, say company leaders.
No bill has been passed, so there is no recreational marijuana industry in New Jersey. Still, many attendees of the New Jersey Cannabis Symposium had green in their eyes as they heard about a new industry, one that offers more ways to make money than just from growing and selling marijuana.
This NJ Advance Media reporter recently went to Oregon and Washington to get a sense of different parts of the industry opportunities. According to a 2017 report from Leafly, Washington and Oregon had 22,952 and 11,295 full-time cannabis jobs, respectively.