With the help and good attitude of the whole team, New England Public Health Training Center just finished its annual data gathering, cleaning and inputting process, to happy results!

Our training instances continued their upward trend, reaching 29,038.  As we reflect on growth, we are happy, but all too aware that growth won’t always continue.  The prevailing winds that support training are accurate identification of need and demand that comes from working closely with state partners.  Gathering email addresses at conferences and improving our email marketing and asking partners and peer training centers helps us promote trainings.  Partners also help us find great experts with local content that is relevant and generates interest, and they help us identify organizations, associations and events that will help the public health workforce for us to sponsor.   Looking forward, we are hoping that some investment in technology, allowing people on other learning platforms to more easily register for our learning, will also help.

There are also forces that lead to lower training performance data. All of our training partners are co funded.  They cannot produce the training on what we provide alone.  If their other funding sources disappear, numbers will drop dramatically. If our training content becomes stale or irrelevant, that can always reduce numbers.  The willingness of the workforce to take training can decline, particularly when it is stretched too thin, due to workforce cuts or attrition.  And finally, the reality is that some learning that is deeper learning that builds capacity, such as coaching teams to work on hard issues like the deBeaumont strategic skills, generate very low numbers.  This is nonetheless a good investment of time and energy, but it does not create numbers that will impress.

Like others in the workforce training world, NEPHTC balances all of these needs, and with the advice of Needs Assessment, the Advisory Committee and training partners and their boards, we make training decisions, and hope to continue growing year over year, while realizing we could be humbled and see reductions in any new reporting period.

Note on technical recording error: A year of difficulty with the EHB.  Unfortunately, despite hundreds of invested hours, due to some technical problems with a new installation of the EHB, recorded hours in the EHB were off by a few hundred instances.  Officially recorded instances were 28,497.

Note: Training instances, commonly termed “number of participants”, are participants who took any online, classroom, or webinar training hosted by NEPHTC, our Community Based Training partners, or sponsored training organizations.