The mission of Dunn University is to Recruit, Train, Develop and Retain the best skilled workforce possible while improving our communities and industries in pursuit of achieving both our corporate and individual true potential.

Meaning:

Recruit: Establish our team as the one you want to be a part of for your career. This will entail high school signing days through college job fairs, Alabama Department of Corrections transition program through veteran enrollment.

Train: Train our team to be the best in the industry. This includes required OSHA training to harnessing the power of our 141 years in business and the many “lifers” that have devoted their lives to our trade. This covers everyone from the newest hire to the Chairman.

Develop: Challenge each member of our team to be better tomorrow than today, in their professional and personal lives. Aid them in deliberately establishing goals then empower and enable those individuals to realize them. Through Dunn University, we acknowledge the future of work will be defined by how it feels rather than merely how it pays.

Retain: Establish an environment of personal pride in our brand, ownership of success and empowerment through the transparent leadership that ensures each of our 1800 employees know exactly how critical they are to the success of Dunn. This pride will ensure they leave work at the end of the day as motivated as they arrived, and as they wash the dirt from their boots after an exhausting day at a job site, they are hungry to get back to work the next day.

Skilled Workforce: A skilled worker is any worker who has special skill, training, knowledge, and ability in their work. A skilled worker may have attended a college, university or technical school. Or, a skilled worker may have learned their skills on the job. Our success depends on all definitions of this, and we must ensure each member of the team is highly skilled in their area of expertise.

Improving our community: Like a camper in the national forest, the burden of leadership we each bear is to leave the campground better than we found it. Through our efforts, we must improve every community we touch, whether just one job there or repeat business. This ranges from volunteer efforts to paid contracts, from speaking at job fairs to teaching at local colleges, from the pristine manner we run our job sites to the relationships we forge. Our legacy is more valuable than profit.

Improving our Industry: Through our efforts and manner, challenge our peers and competitors alike to up their game. We must never become complacent in our roles and always set the standard in our industry.

Pursuit of corporate true potential: We must never forget we are a company here to make a profit. If we have the best developed individuals but lose focus of our corporate goals, then we have failed. If we have a banner year but burn our team out along the way, we have failed. Like a stock on Wall Street, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. We must earn our position in the industry, and on the team, every day. I have concern with using “corporate” in this one-liner but ultimately people know we are a business and pursuing a profit.

Pursuit of individual true potential: Intrinsic satisfaction is truly the ultimate measure of individual success. As part of Dunn University, we must enable and empower individuals to realize their true potential. This means first understanding what defines success at each, individual level then paving the path for each person to achieve it. This goes much further than primary craft skills and encompasses whole life development.

True Potential: The highest level of confidence, joy, fulfillment, satisfaction and success possible. This begins with understanding and living according to our core values. Individuals who are striving for their true potential will never achieve it…but live in a growth mindset, improving each day. True potential is not a measure on a corporate spreadsheet but instead a warmness in our hearts that allows us to look back as we gasp our last breath and know we lived life to its fullest and achieved those things that mattered most in our years. True potential is measured in the legacy we leave on this world… on everything and everyone we touched