I’ve been thinking about the lifelong learner phrase now and was wondering how it applies to us here at PRIER and how it can apply to your company or your life. Call it what you want, but we encourage it for all of our associates at PRIER.
Whenever I think about the associates at PRIER, I always start with the plant floor associates, the most important group we have at PRIER. They make sure the product is “A Quality” and are always the ones who suggest the best ways to improve PRIER. How does PRIER encourage them to be lifelong learners? For starters, PRIER hosts monthly Lunch and Learns to educate our associates on a variety of topics such as health and wellness, good business practices and financial planning. We take the time to train our plant floor associates, not only how to do their job, but cross train them on other jobs. We also invest in our people through training to make our manufacturing environment even better. Our plant floor leads are brought to the next level with Supervisory Training and one-to-one meetings with their manager.
We also encourage the associates at PRIER to find resources outside of our campus to make them even better, whether that be some type of third party training, peer mentoring or coaching. We think it is very important to get other perspectives about business and operations. If our associates stay inside the PRIER campus all the time, I’m not sure that makes us better.
For all associates, we encourage continued education. PRIER has paid tuition reimbursement for associates wanting to get trained in some type of vocational training all the way up to associates getting advanced college degrees.
You’ve heard the phrase “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” That applies to learning too. I think the most important thing you can do to encourage constant learning is to hire the right people who are naturally curious and have an attitude for learning. We’ve seen as you do this, it feeds on itself. When one associate realizes that a co-worker is making himself or herself better, they naturally want to be better too. An entire company doing this is a force to be reckoned with!
I guess without really knowing it, we’ve built an environment of constant learning. What is it that you do, or your company does that encourages lifelong learning? We’d love to hear about it— it might even make us better!
