Back to School - PCBS

Back to School

Jeff Bassill

Published 8/31/2026 | Category: General

I have been reading the LinkedIn and other social media posts from this year's class at Pacific Coast Banking School, the two weeks of study at the University of Washington that make up part of PCBS' three year graduate-level program. The posts are the usual mix of exhaustion and pride, people posting photos of case study binders at midnight and group shots from the dorm lounge. Watching them made me think back to my own two weeks there, and how little I understood at the time what those two weeks were actually going to do to me.

I went in 2003. I was working at Bank of the West, and two of my bosses, Michael Robinson and Bob Shaffer, put my name forward for the program. I don't think either of them had any idea what they were setting in motion. I certainly didn't.

This was back when the internet was still finding its footing. Spreadsheets and library research were still normal parts of how you did the work. I hadn't sat in a classroom in eighteen years, so I signed up for the two day pre-workshop just to knock some of the rust off before the real thing started. That weekend session is where I met a group of people I still hear from occasionally, more than twenty years later.

There is something to putting thirty and forty and fifty year old bankers into dorm rooms on a college campus for two straight weeks. The adjustment is real. The furniture is hard. And the dorm smell never quite leaves you. But it did not take long before we had all reverted to full college behavior. Practical jokes, poker games, walks to the pub during the few free hours we had. None of it was in the curriculum, and all of it is still what I remember most clearly.

What actually changed me happened by the end of the second week. We were deep into the upper level mechanics of how a bank actually runs, the strategy, the marketing, the finance at a level I had never been exposed to, and something clicked. I decided right there that I no longer wanted to run a branch. I wanted to run a financial institution. That was the work I wanted to be doing, not outside business calls and the day to day of customer service.

Six months later, with my first four PCBS assignments turned in and some good feedback behind me, I took the leap and applied for a VP of Operations job at a local credit union. I knew one of the other VPs there, but the CEO and the board were new faces entirely. It was the right opportunity at the right moment, and I took it, even though it meant I was no longer technically "a banker." Both the school and the credit union let me finish the program anyway.

By the time I finished PCBS, I wanted more. I was now an Executive VP and COO who had never finished a bachelor's degree, and that gap was suddenly obvious to me in a way it hadn't been before. So I went back to school the month after PCBS ended, and I did not stop until four years later, when I walked away with an MBA from Colorado State. I never stopped working full time through any of it. I was still "a banker" until 2004, and every bit of that coursework happened evenings and weekends. I didn't take time off, I just carried a second job on top of the one I already had.

PCBS to bachelor's to MBA. Each one built the confidence that I actually had what it took to keep moving forward. In 2015, that chain led to the biggest step of all, becoming President and CEO of Kings Federal Credit Union. That is a long way from branch manager, even if it is still the same person underneath.

Here is the part I actually want PCBS, and anyone reading this, to take away. The value of a program like this is not really the curriculum. It's good curriculum, but that's not the point. The real value is that it hands people two weeks of exposure to what is actually possible in this industry, at a level most of us never get to see from where we sit day to day. I didn't decide I wanted to run an institution because someone told me to. I decided it because PCBS finally showed me what running one actually involved. People don't usually change direction from advice. They change direction when they finally see the fuller picture of the job.

Michael and Bob put my name on that list without knowing what it would set off. That's the part worth sitting with if you manage people. You rarely get to see the exact moment someone else's trajectory shifts, but it happens more often than you'd think, and it usually starts with somebody just handing over an opportunity rather than delivering a speech about potential.

It is never too late to go back to school, or to take on the next challenge in front of you. Somebody in your organization is probably one opportunity away from a different career. So, what's yours, and whose is it?

The reflections above are my own personal recollections and do not represent an official position of Kings Federal Credit Union.