Building the Modern Public Health Worker: Professional Development and Opportunity

The public health workforce is rapidly changing, yet we often have little information about who the modern public health worker is. One thing we do know is that developing expertise and experience is more decentralized than ever. Today, a health worker may have a variety of backgrounds and experiences, but, more importantly, they can also gain knowledge, skills, and competencies through a variety of learning formats, ranging from formal education, to webinars, to MOOCs.

Health departments can play a vital role in maximizing the opportunities that exist to train the workforce. The first step is to embrace learning networks, which allow connections between different systems, resources, and trainings. TRAIN, one example of such a network, connects 29 health agencies, including 25 states and four federal agencies (Medical Reserve Corps (MRC), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and Veterans Health Administration (VHA)) to 29,000 training opportunities developed by nearly 4,000 providers of training to over 900,000 professionals. In learning networks, health workers can explore various topics that build their expertise and knowledge in a competency-based environment while completing required, agency-oriented training in parallel. There is opportunity within professional development that learning networks can help tap.

Current TRAIN data suggest that health workers participate in training that interests them. In 2014, a professional on TRAIN registered for a training every 28 seconds - over one million registrations in 2014 alone, double the 2012 figure, and 4.5 million during TRAIN’s lifespan. What we learn about workforce training can help us better prepare the modern public health worker.

This session will illustrate how learning networks such as TRAIN provide access to thousands of competency-based training opportunities for the public health workforce. This presentation will also demonstrate how connections between different agencies can develop within learning networks.