Public Health Workforce Development Needs: A National Assessment of Executives' Perspectives

Leadership Perspectives on Local Health Department Workforce Development: A Regional Training Needs Assessment

The public health workforce broadly-across disciplines, tiers, and settings-requires strategic skills to advance population health outcomes. In early 2020, the Region V Public Health Training Center conducted a competency-based training needs assessment survey with all 501 local health departments in the 6-state region, including small agencies that were previously excluded from available national data sources. Health officials or designees from 290 agencies responded (58% response rate) with perspectives regarding the ability of their staff to sufficiently apply strategic skills. Findings highlight training needs among the region's local governmental public health workforce and differences in those needs by the size of population served by the agency. Notable training priorities include the skill domains of Budgeting & Financial Management and Change Management, among others.

A Multilevel Workforce Study on Drivers of Turnover and Training Needs in State Health Departments: Do Leadership and Staff Agree?

OBJECTIVES

To characterize agreement between senior governmental public health staff and their subordinates concerning drivers for staff turnover, and skill importance and ability.

DESIGN

Data were combined from 2 national surveys conducted in 2017; one was a nationally representative, individual-level survey of public health workers, and one was an individual-level survey of their leadership.

SETTING

State health agencies.

PARTICIPANTS

Respondents who held scientific, nonsupervisory positions at state health agency central offices (n = 3606) were matched with leadership (n = 193) who provided programmatic area oversight.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Drivers of turnover and training needs are the primary outcomes examined in this article.

RESULTS

Leaders and their staff agreed on the main 2 drivers of turnover (low salary and lack of opportunities for advancement), but discordance was observed for other major drivers of turnover. Substantial discordance was observed between leaders and their staff in terms of perceived staff proficiency with selected skills.

CONCLUSIONS

This multilevel assessment of workplace perceptions offers evidence around training needs and drivers of turnover in state health agencies. Although staff and leaders agree on some major drivers of turnover, other potential reasons for leaving cited by staff, and the difference in perceptions of skills, can help target job satisfaction, training, and retention efforts in state health agencies.

A review of the applied epidemiology workforce in the United States: past, present, and future

Applied epidemiologists are key professionals within the public health workforce, fulfilling core public health science functions. The public health system in the United States has been rapidly transforming over the last decade and epidemiologists will need to develop new skill sets to be successful in the future of public health. A review of the literature was undertaken to gain a comprehensive understanding of the past and present of the applied epidemiology workforce to inform future workforce initiatives aimed at improving applied epidemiology practice. The literature search identified 48 articles related to applied epidemiologists working in the United States at the federal, state, and local levels. These articles described efforts to build, enumerate, and assess the competency of the applied epidemiology workforce in addition to putting forward opinions about it. Overall, the articles demonstrated significant prior work enumerating the applied epidemiology workforce, some prior work identifying epidemiology training needs, and few prior studies assessing competency. The functions, skill sets, and training needs of epidemiologists have changed over time and the literature provides a number of recommendations for future training. Continued assessment of the workforce literature is recommended to monitor training needs and competency for use in implementing effective workforce development activities.