The role of budtender is one of the most important in any medical marijuana dispensary. Not only are budtenders the face of a dispensary’s brand, but they also play a big part in customer service (answering questions and solving problems), sales (closing sales), marketing (upselling), legal (regulatory compliance), finance (completing transactions), and operations (inventory). While budtenders aren’t solely responsible for most of these functions, they do play an important role in each of them. That means you need a lot of skills and knowledge to get a budtender job in the growing cannabis industry.

Budtender Job Responsibilities

Budtenders at medical marijuana dispensaries are experts in cannabis. They’re capable of listening to customers, answering questions, and providing recommendations for cannabis products that will help customers relieve highly personalized symptoms. They also have the responsibility of distributing products to customers, using a point-of-sale system, keeping the dispensary clean and organized, and working well with coworkers. At the same time, they need to comply with all relevant laws. With all of these responsibilities, it’s not surprising that many dispensaries use different job titles for today’s budtender positions, such as medical cannabis guide, advisor, mentor, counselor, expert, specialist, consultant, coach, or assistant. Some dispensaries get even more creative with the job title and refer to budtenders as compassion care technicians or patient liaisons to better reflect the position’s current responsibilities. At first glance, it might seem like a lot of people could qualify for a budtender job, but there is so much more to being a great budtender – who helps build a dispensary business while effectively helping customers – than what the day-to-day responsibilities of the position might lead you to think. For example, the best budtenders (and therefore, the most employable budtenders) understand:

• All of the products available at the dispensary
• Communication skills to determine which products to recommend to certain customers based on their personal situations, preferences, and lifestyles
• The science of marijuana, including strain genetics, cannabinoids, terpenes, indica plants, sativa plants, and hybrid plants
• Consumption methods and the pros and cons of each
• Cannabis quality, effectiveness, and testing
• How cannabis is cultivated
• Measurement and weight conversions
• Current regulations
• How to read product labels
• Dosing
• Language (to avoid making noncompliant statements)
• How to close a sale and upsell
• How to deliver exceptional customer service at all times
• The importance of customer confidentiality
• Current trends in medical marijuana
• And more

If you can become highly proficient and knowledgeable in all of these areas, then your chances of landing a budtender job are exponentially higher than other candidates who don’t have the same knowledge and proficiencies.

Your Budtender Resume and Job Applications

Your resume and any job applications that you submit must show that you have the skills and knowledge to meet the minimum budtender job requirements. Read medical marijuana dispensary budtender job descriptions and take note of the specific responsibilities and job requirements that hiring managers are currently looking for. Create a list of your skills and experience that can be mapped to each of the job requirements, and use that list to develop your budtender resume. For example, if one of the job requirements in a budtender job vacancy announcement says the candidate must be able to provide excellent customer service skills to help customers choose the best products, you can either cite your previous budtending experience with specific examples of times you helped customers or you can cite other customer service experiences in different industries (if you don’t have cannabis industry experience). The key is to take whatever experience you have and show hiring managers why it’s relevant to their business within your resume. If you worked in retail in the past, include that experience on your resume and job applications, and describe specific examples of how that experience makes you a better salesperson than other candidates. Did you routinely close a high dollar amount of sales every month? Include that accomplishment and any sales figures you can in your resume. You don’t have to have experience working in the cannabis industry to get a job as a budtender if you can prove to employers that you have the right knowledge and skills already. Think about it from the employer’s viewpoint. For the dispensary owner, the budtenders bring in revenue through sales which keeps the dispensary doors open. At the same time, the budtenders could destroy the business by providing terrible customer service or violating laws. The budtenders could tarnish the dispensary’s brand in the community (which leads to lost sales), get the dispensary in legal trouble, or even cause the dispensary to lose its medical marijuana license. With that in mind, it’s crucial that your resume, interview attire, social media footprint (80% of employers screen job candidates’ social media profiles during the hiring process), and demeanor are highly professional and consistent with the dispensary’s brand where you apply for a budtender job. The marijuana industry has matured considerably in recent years, and the image of a stoner budtender is a thing of the past. Today’s most successful budtenders (and the dispensaries that hire them) are professional, highly knowledgeable, compassionate, fantastic listeners, and very professional. That’s how you stand out from the crowd when a hiring manager sits down to look through a big pile of budtender resumes.

Getting the Skills You Need to be a Budtender

If you don’t have experience working as a budtender or in a medical marijuana dispensary, you can still land a job as a budtender with adequate training. In fact, even job candidates who have experience working as budtenders can benefit from cannabis-specific training. As the industry continues to grow in the coming years, the competition to get budtender jobs will increase. You can guarantee that the people who will get those jobs (and future promotions) will be the ones with the most knowledge and understanding of what dispensaries are looking for in budtenders. You can gain all of that knowledge and more in Leafy Green Agency’s Medical Cannabis Dispensary and Medical Cannabis Delivery Service Training seminar. At the completion of the course, your value as a cannabis dispensary or delivery service employee will increase significantly as will your chances of landing a marijuana job. You’ll also receive a verifiable certification that documents your new credentials. Follow the link above for all of the course details. And if you haven’t downloaded our FREE guide to cannabis jobs yet, do it now! It’s filled with useful information to help you work in the cannabis industry.