This month’s Investor Spotlight is a special edition honoring the recipient of BRAC’s Corporate Professional Development Award. This award, presented in partnership with Forum 225, seeks to recognize a company for outstanding programs focused on young professional development. Recipients prioritize leadership development and mentorship as key aspects of business growth and talent retention.
Petroleum Service Corporation (PSC) is BRAC’s 2021 Corporate Professional Development Award honoree. PSC’s Learning & Development Manager Dustin Pirtle answered some questions regarding the importance of professional development.
What benefits did you find in using professional development for your staff?
Offering professional development training programs allows our employees to perform better and prepares them for positions of greater responsibility. Our customers also benefit from the high level of efficient service they receive from our team members.
Offering quality training and development opportunities also enhances PSC’s reputation for providing rewarding career opportunities and taking good care of our employees and customers.
How has professional development improved your talent retention?
When our employees can do their jobs more effectively, they become more confident. This leads to greater job satisfaction and improved employee retention. When our employees feel that they are being challenged and developed for the growth and opportunities that are just around the corner, this also boosts our retention efforts as we build our leadership pipeline.
What made you realize leadership development was key to the business’s success?
Here at PSC, we are a people company—meaning our employees are our biggest asset. Every one of our employees plays an extremely important role in delivering strong customer service and providing value to our customers. We’re proud that more than 75% of our leadership team today was promoted from within, and this number is growing every year. This is a direct reflection of a strong leadership development strategy that is supported by all levels of leadership within our organization. I personally have been with PSC for 21 years, and I am grateful to work for an organization that invests in developing its employees to reach their full potential.
What advice do you have for other organizations that want to begin prioritizing professional development for their organizations?
Leadership development programs are tools for grooming future leaders for your organization. If you’d like to be able to promote staff to managerial positions in the future, providing targeted training now can help you ensure your best and brightest are prepared to move up within your organization.
As with many things in business, you only get out of something what you are willing to put into it. In the PSC family, we believe that for you to become successful, you must encourage those around you to be successful. This servant leadership philosophy is a major focus in all our development efforts.
While there are many great programs out there that can help you get started in developing your employees, it’s important to make sure that the development programs you use are aligned with your company culture in order to be most effective.