Last week, Training Magazine recognized DPR’s Learning and Development efforts—we ranked 26th on the magazine’s 2017 Training Top 125 list. Many of our customers were also recognized on the list, which includes companies from all sectors. Congratulations to all the firms recognized! Read the full article here.

A bit of background on the award: The Training Top 125 ranks companies that excel at employee learning and development, and it is determined by assessing a range of qualitative and quantitative factors. According to the magazine, “Training Top 125 Award winners are the organizations with the most successful learning and development programs in the world—and the Top 125 has been the premier learning industry awards program for 16 years.” DPR has appeared on the list six times. In addition, last year, Training Magazine named DPR’s Melissa King an Emerging Training Leader.

DPR's Melissa King (bottom row, right) celebrates a successful Current Best Practices training session in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Melissa was named an Emerging Training Leader by Training Magazine. (Photo courtesy: Melissa King)

A few examples of DPR’s learning opportunities:

• A national DPR training initiative that helps our project engineers (PEs) become even better, more well-rounded, technical builders is in line with our core value of “Ever Forward.” PEs from around the country converge at one DPR region for the week, where participants have long days of actual physical building, lessons learned from the day, team-building events at night, and DPR culture story telling. The unique experience also incorporates the company’s strong commitment to giving back to the community—in a recent session, participants donated chicken coops they built to local schools.

Project engineers strap on their boots and learn how to lay concrete during a build day with DPR's self-perform work concrete team. (Photo courtesy: Everett Rosette)

• The Energy Project is an approach we used on one of our complex hospital projects, which extended beyond our employees and included the engineers, architects, subcontractors and customer on that project team. The concept behind The Energy Project is that by raising our own personal energy levels, we can increase our personal and professional performance. Looking at four aspects of energy (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual), the team’s overall energy improved by 43 percent as a direct result of training.

Those are just two examples of the diverse learning opportunities we offer, which range from focusing on technical aspects of construction to people skills (self-awareness, conflict resolution, time/life management, etc.). Using data from Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Critical Success Factors and more performance metrics, our training concentrates on building better builders.

At DPR, we are a learning organization and believe who we build is as important as what we build. We recognize that continuous learning and development are keys to the success of individuals and project teams.

Who we build is as important as what we build: a group at Current Best Practices participates in an interactive quality control exercise. (Photo courtesy: Melissa King)