The questions people actually ask

No — and we want to be very clear about that. The only place to get the real Food Protection Certificate is the NYC Health Academy, in person, on a proctored English exam. LicensedJob is the prep that gets you ready for that exam. Anyone telling you they can hand you the credential online is selling you something the city does not accept.

Because the Spanish-speaking learner is the one who's been underserved. The official DOH course is a wall of English text with a 60%+ ESL dropout rate. We flipped that: Spanish-first audio, Spanish-first writing, Salvadoran-accented narration. The English subtitle is always on and is not toggleable — that's intentional. The proctored exam at the Health Academy is administered in English, and we don't want a single vocabulary word to be a surprise on test day.

90 minutes — the same as the real DOH test. 50 questions, 70% to pass, identical format. By the time you walk into the Health Academy, the actual exam should feel like an attempt you've already done four times.

No. This is the single most common misconception we hear. NYC does not accept ServSafe, StateFoodSafety, Premier, eFoodHandlers, or any other national ANSI-CFP credential as a substitute for the NYC Food Protection Certificate. Every supervisor in the five boroughs has to go through the city's own course and sit the city's own proctored, in-person exam. The market is structurally captive to that one process.

$24, paid directly to the city when you register. Add $0.60 if you pay by credit or debit card. That fee is paid to the NYC Department of Health, not to LicensedJob — we don't touch it. It's the same whether you prepped with us, with the free DOH course, or with anyone else.

They can retake it — the DOH lets you re-register and pay the $24 again, as many times as needed. On our side, the Premium plan gives them unlimited practice exam attempts and a 30-day support window so they can text us with the questions that tripped them up. Most workers who finish all 15 modules and pass our timed practice once tend to pass the real test on the first try, but we plan for the days that don't go like that.

Yes. Every business plan includes a manager dashboard with each employee's module progress, practice exam scores, and certificate status. You can see at a glance who's on track for the in-person exam and who needs a nudge — without nagging anyone. It's also your audit trail if a health-department inspector asks who's been trained.

Yes. The Food Protection Certificate is issued by the NYC DOH to the worker, not to the employer — it follows the person, not the business. The credential is theirs to take to the next job. LicensedJob won't claw back access either; once they've earned a certificate of completion in our system, it's on their account, not yours.

We don't sell employee lists. We don't share progress data outside your organization. We don't use your worker roster for marketing to anyone but you. If you ask us to delete an employee's record — or your whole account — we wipe it within 30 days. Your data is yours. After the relationship ends, your team keeps any certificates of completion they've earned.

Honest answer: every illustration and every voiceover in the course today is AI-generated, art-directed by Nova. We say so on the press kit and we say so here. The cultural authorship — the Salvadoran voice, the pupusería examples, the script choices, what's funny and what's true — is human. Doña Mirna and Nova make those calls. The AI is the production pipeline; the authorship is family.