Have you ever heard of the ServSafe Food Protection Manager Certification, otherwise known as FPMC? This industry-recognized credential is an important one for foodservice professionals.
ServSafe offers a course—both live and online—in food safety best practices. At the end of the course is an exam, and professionals who pass both the course and the exam receive the certification.[1] The program has been active for a hundred years with four million people having been certified.[2]
There’s a good chance that the next restaurant you eat at will be managed by someone who has this certification.
Looking at online jobs data through JobsEQ’s RTI, one can see that over thirty-one thousand job ads that list FPMC as a requirement were posted in the past twelve months alone.[3]
What are these jobs? The most common are shown below.
The occupations that use this certification are not surprising—the top six are all related to food. Of these, food service managers were by far the most common, making up nearly one-third of all job postings listing FPMC.
O*NET describes food service managers as those who “plan, direct, or coordinate activities of an organization or department that serves food and beverages.” Some obvious jobs that would fit this description are restaurant managers, who indeed make up much of this category. But also included are dietary managers (who can work for nursing homes and other healthcare facilities) as well as catering and banquet managers.
Food service manager jobs pay an average annual wage of $57,300.[4] They’re projected to grow at an annual rate of 0.8%, which is above the national average.[5]
While only 5% of online ads for food service managers list FPMC as a requirement, those are just the ads where the certification is explicitly mentioned. There are still many other jobs beyond the 5% where this certification would be a useful asset to jobseekers.
[1] https://www.servsafe.com/ServSafe-Manager/Get-Certified
[2] https://www.servsafe.com/about-us
[3] US online job postings active at any point in the twelve months preceding 3/7/19, filtered for those that list ServSafe Food Protection Manager Certification as a requirement.
[4] Source: JobsEQ, based upon OES data for 2017.
[5] Projected annual rate of growth for all occupations is 0.7% per the BLS. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm