About Us

Founded originally in 1990 by Bud Cummings as Alaska Consulting and Training, Professional Development Associates is a full-service management consulting and training organization.

Mission Statement
We will provide the highest quality professional service and products available to clients anywhere at any price, and will ensure our services and products provide maximum benefit for the dollars invested.

We will do this by:

• Listening, carefully and completely to what the client wants.
• Helping, the client identify problem areas and success indicators.
• Customizing a program, implementing and evaluating its effectiveness to meet the client's needs to solve the client's problems.
• Carefully and thoroughly screening, selecting and offering our corporate and OD/Training clients the most professional, world class products which maximize value and minimize costs.

Working in close coordination with any existing OD or training department or personnel, helping them achieve success in their programs.

Carefully selecting, training and coaching our consultants and trainers.

Helping our consultants and sponsored partners succeed in their own business by coaching, mentoring, conducting training sessions, and responding to questions. For more about our philosophy and what we do, please see OD Services with its related hyperlinks.

About our Principal - Bud Cummings

Very Experienced. Over 25 years senior HR/HRD and OD experience with commercial, professional, industrial, private and governmental organizations.

Bud's experience has been in numerous areas, and include:

A wide range of consulting, training and development activities. Assessments, needs analysis, team building, leadership retreats, management training, bench strength analysis, and much more. Click on Organizational Development Services for more details.

360° Feedback programs. We help organizations determine if they are ready for 360 feedback, help them prepare the organization to receive it, help them develop effective behavioral oriented questions, help them identify groups who could/should be providing feedback to whom (including outside vendors, boards of directors, customers), provide one-on-one feedback and coaching for professional development for senior executives and managers, facilitate upward feedback and peer feedback debriefing sessions, and develop and interpret roll-up reports which serve as focused, targeted needs analyses. And we also train their HR/OD people to do all of the above, if they have the requisite background.

Mediation. Very experienced at both finding and building bridges of understanding between and among people, work units, and organizations. Has worked with state agencies and state boards, large petroleum companies (EXXON, ARCO, BP, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company), School Districts (large, 55,000 students), and many more.

Senior Project Management. Has successful experience managing major, high visibility, multiple agency projects.

Presentations. Has averaged over 150 presentation per year. Has presented to state ASTD conventions; selected to present as national convention in break-out sessions. Has successfully and energetically presented to groups from two to two thousand.

He is:

People Oriented. Completed two graduate programs in Counseling with a behavioral orientation. Was adjunct professor in Counseling at graduate level for a few years. He looks for and finds tools that allow people to help themselves.

Business Oriented. Undergraduate with high honors in business from the University of Tennessee. Very quantitatively, statistically and qualitatively oriented. Beta Gamma Sigma and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Societies. Also had many years of senior leadership in HR/OD environment. National member ASTD and SHRM.

An author of highly interactive supervisory training program being delivered by national training group. Has also developed several unique hands-on experiential activities designed for senior level executives which are being used by several organizations.

A life-time learner. Continues own training and learning. Examples include: Center for Creative Leadership training and certification in BENCHMARKS (a 360° and executive development program for top level executives); Mediation Training form the Lemmon Mediation Institute; Performance Management and TQM training from WMI; TQM, BASELINE (a quality approach to systemic organizational assessments), and Behavioral Preferences (DiSC) training and numerous other certifications from Carlson Learning Company; Decision Style Training developed by Dr. Michael Driver; MBTI facilitation Training, Center for Applied Psychological Type, several Training Workshops with Bob Pike, and much more.

Very Professional. Comfortable and effective with all levels of any organization.

A Pragmatist: Refuses to go with "flavor of the day." Uses methods and programs that produce measurable results.

Affiliations and Associates

Bud is affiliated with National SHRM, National ASTD and is a lifetime member of TROA. We also have several strategic partners including: Performance Support Systems; Vital Learning, Inc.; VitalSmarts; TTI, Inc.; and Scantron.

We also have associates with Ph.D.s and Masters Degrees who are very experienced in both consulting and training. These associates are available in almost every part of the country, and partner with us as necessary to meet the needs of the clients.

Partial List of Customers

A few of the organizations with whom we have worked:

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