Circle Seafoods Hosts Alaska Sea Grant Workshop for Seafood Processing Leaders
Circle Seafoods is shaping the future™ of the wild salmon industry. Our approach adds efficiency, fair treatment, and sustainability to the supply chain, making wild salmon more profitable and enhancing the fishery’s quality and long-term value. This means economically viable harvesting, thriving communities, and strong fisheries. We’re committed to prosperity, from fishermen to families, for generations.
Our approach to quality is holistic, and it includes investing in industry-specific training for Circle team members. Without specific training and the buy-in of the whole team – from executives to engineers to our seasonal production team – achieving our mission would be impossible.
Seafood Workforce Development
As part of our holistic approach, we hosted a Seafood Workforce Development Specialist from Alaska Sea Grant to train production managers on essential leadership skills. A collaboration between NOAA and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska Sea Grant supports healthy coastal resources and vibrant economies and communities in Alaska. Its Marine Advisory Program agents carry out the mission of the agency through research, education and outreach.
The Seafood Processor Line Lead Training that Circle’s production managers completed is a professional development program for aspiring, beginning, and mid-level managers in the seafood industry. Led by a Workforce Development Specialist, leaders who complete the course gain knowledge on topics that grow their leadership and management skills, including:
- The role of a supervisor
- Conflict resolution
- Leadership and ethics
- Communication
- Decision making and managing change
- Motivation and team building
- Supervising a diverse workforce
Program Experience
Chris Shell, Circle’s Quality and Data Manager, shares his experience with Alaska Sea Grant’s Line Lead training: “As a younger member of the production leadership team, it was really useful to go through that experience. We learned how our leadership styles mesh together and the ways that we can support each other. I thought it was a really valuable experience for me.”
2025 will be Chris’s second season with Circle. When Chris joined the company, he saw that Circle operates at the intersection of his interests:
“Tech, salmon, Alaska – that was kind of the perfect match for where I was in my life.”
After the season, Chris was hired into a full time role to push the organization’s technology initiatives forward. About the transition, Chris says,
“To anyone who is interested in joining Circle on the STEM (science, technology, engineering mathematics) side of things, you get responsibility, you get to be in a growth mindset environment, and you get to be in this synergistic environment that combines old ways of doing things with the new technologies that are out there today.”
Chris and the team at Circle use those technologies to track and control the variables that influence the quality of the product we bring to the market. By gathering information at each step of Circle’s process and throughout the supply chain, Circle’s quality team drives analyses that continuously raise the quality and value of the wild salmon resource that is harvested.
By training and upskilling traditionally seasonal employees, Circle facilitates the growth of team members and enables them to buy-in to and drive our mission forward – to raise the value of Alaska’s wild salmon fisheries and build a more sustainable and vibrant seafood processing sector at large.
Learn more about working with Circle Seafoods
