Meeting workforce development demands in times of challenge: South Carolina's public health workforce assessment

In an era when governmental public health administrators are facing workforce development challenges related to employee shortages and reduced resources, the South Carolina Public Health Training Center (SCPHTC) was developed to help strengthen the public health workforce within South Carolina by providing competency-based continuing education. After selecting the 2010 Council on Linkages' (CoL) Core Public Health Competencies for Public Health Professionals as the foundation for all continuing education activities, SCPHTC conducted a workforce assessment to prioritize training needs for its partner, the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), whose last assessment occurred in 2003 and was based on 2001 CoL Core Competencies. Using a collaborative approach with DHEC partners to design the Workforce Assessment Survey, the instrument was setup as a skills-gap analysis. It consisted of two four-point scales and was designed based on DHEC's four tiers of employees: Support Staff, Field or Clinic Workers, Program Managers or Supervisors, and Upper Level Management. Each tier had specific items aligned to corresponding CoL Core Competency Tiers 1, 2, and 3. Over 2,000 DHEC participants were asked to self-assess their current competency proficiency level to the level of agreement that they needed the competency for their job. Demographic items were also included to enumerate the current workforce status. This study discusses the assessment's purpose, collaborative instrument development, descriptive analysis of the Spring 2012 results by tier, and how the results will be used by SCPHTC to develop training that will assist health department administrators in meeting their workforce development needs.