About
Pharmer’s Market is a wholesale distribution company in the Oregon cannabis market. The urgent battles they face include the challenges of distribution in a large state with over 750 retail storefronts and sometimes unpredictable swings in wholesale prices. But the management team at Pharmer’s knows for certain that maintaining a well-trained and confident workforce is key to facing any challenge.

Why upLVL?
Pharmer’s Market is a wholesale distribution company in the Oregon cannabis market. The urgent battles they face include the challenges of distribution in a large state with over 750 retail storefronts and sometimes unpredictable swings in wholesale prices. But the management team at Pharmer’s knows for certain that maintaining a well-trained and confident workforce is key to facing any challenge.

upLVL’s On the Level courses are specifically designed to deliver compliance training for each license type in the market. The courses are designed to be completed in modules of about 5 minutes, and each module features a short quiz to reinforce the learning objectives. It took Pharmer’s 50 employees about 6 weeks for all to fully complete the modules and pass the certification exam for distribution compliance. By doing so, Pharmer’s Market became the first distribution company in Oregon to achieve upLVL’s corporate-level certification. Pharmer’s employees are expected to recertify on compliance training once per year, and the company has made the training a required part of new employee onboarding.

“It is critical to make training a foundational part of company culture and processes. The best value of the platform is when you use it regularly and make it a required part of onboarding and other company processes.”

“Getting time set aside for company-sponsored training is generally not an easy task, but upLVL’s courses and structure make it easy for employees to fit necessary
training into their busy schedules.”

Personalized Training
In addition to the On the Level compliance courses, upLVL offers companies like Pharmer’s the ability to create and upload their own internal training and to create their own employee certifications.

“We decided to make certain trainings required for specific jobs,” Miller-Dickson says, describing the company’s use of the custom training features of upLVL. “The biggest hurdle we had to get over was the belief that everything had to be professionally produced.” Pharmer’s has adopted a simple approach to producing custom training – managers simply video record themselves on their own phones, training a new employee on a specific skill. Working with upLVL’s customer service team, Miller-Dickson and the manager will create a certification-style exam that the employee must complete after watching the training. For example, sales reps must take the “Terms and Collections” training and pass the certification exam to offer terms to their customers.

“We’re starting to really see the benefit of internal training and certification,” Miller-Dickson says. “There’s no question whether someone has received training or demonstrated their knowledge of the process or skill.”

“The thing that sold me on upLVL was the combination of having relevant and important content on the platform already – especially compliance training – while also being an easy platform to build our own custom training programs. ”

“The upLVL team is really helpful and easy to work with. Mike Gardner, who runs customer success for upLVL, will do whatever it takes to keep us happy and productive. ”

Angela Miller-Dickson is Pharmer’s Director of Human Resources. Her prior experience includes senior HR positions at IKEA, the wine industry, and startups in the finance and high-tech industries.

At Pharmer’s, Angela is focused on building a resilient workforce that is confident in their understanding not only of company processes, but also the regulatory environment they work in.

“upLVL has been an amazing platform for organizing our training and keeping employees on track,” Miller-Dickson says. “I’ve used a lot of training platforms, and many of them are complicated and inflexible. upLVL makes it easy to organize and implement our training programs and track employee progress.”

On top of the custom training, the upLVL platform features hundreds of business skills training courses ranging from customer service and sales skills to workplace inclusion and managing diverse employee groups.

“We’ve started doing ‘Foundation Fridays’ where we select a group of training modules from upLVL and assign them out to the team,”

Miller-Dickson describes. “The beauty of having the training online and in such digestible chunks is that employees can do it anywhere, even if they only have 10 minutes to commit to it. And they can track their progress and pick additional courses to take if they care to.”

Miller-Dickson reports that Pharmer’s employees “see upLVL as a perk of employment. They really appreciate the fact that the company cares about their own development and careers, and they want to take advantage of that.”