13 Dec 4 ways BEMA gives you a competitive advantage: #1 – Innovative Training And Education

Kerwin Brown, President/CEO

BEMA’s overarching mission is to:

• Connect
• Educate
• Provide resources for our members and the industries they serve.

How do we achieve our mission? With a strategic plan. The word “strategy” is thrown around so much that it has become a buzzword that’s short on meaning. Take a few minutes with me while I unpack what BEMA’s strategy means for YOU.

As a BEMA member, I want you to get an inside look into the tactics we’re using to stay current in our ever-changing industry.

There are four aspects of achieving BEMA’s mission. As a member of this association, these four areas give you an overwhelming competitive advantage. These four areas include:

• Innovative Training and Education
• Member-Focused Value and Engagement
• Partnerships and Alliances
• Financial Strength and Sustainability

Over the course of  few blog posts, I will explain each of these pillars.

For today, I’ll start with the first: Innovative Training and Education

The biggest hurdle in our industry is the same hurdle all industries face—people. Not the economy or regulations or technology, but the people who collectively are your organization. That is what makes or breaks a company. If you have a team filled with talented, motivated and well-trained people, your chances of success are much higher.

Through ongoing training, BEMA provides our members with opportunities to advance the training of employees, whether they work in an office or on a line.

For the last several years, we focused on developing BEMA-U (BEMA University). That is because we know how important it is to shine the spotlight on people by nurturing the talent that already exists in your organization and training your employees to model after and build on those skill sets.

BEMA-U’s training programs are customized to the baking industry, and participants return to work the next day and immediately put their learnings into action.

Hopefully you attended some of the 100+ courses at IBIEducate in September where we brought the same philosophy we use with BEMA-U: facilitating personal learning experiences that go beyond the knowledge level to application.

Just as IBIEducate offered specialized content tracks to address a spectrum of trending topics, BEMA-U provides customized content and delivery to our member companies. That collaboration is no accident; it’s strategy in motion.

IBIEducate provides access to a wealth of industry training.

Tailored course offerings through BEMA-U can be cohort-style learning (where small groups meet three times throughout a year) or traditional one-time workshops and include: Team Effectiveness, Mastering Sales Effectiveness, Transformational Leadership and Sanitary Design.

Learn more here: https://www.bema.org/bema-university/

Check back soon for the next post in the series, where I discuss why member engagement is criticial to the success of BEMA’s mission.