Expanding Competencies Through Credentials
August 22, 2024 | Melinda Eagle
Developing the public health workforce continues to be a top priority for state and territorial health officials. In ASTHO’s survey of State/Territorial Health Officials’ 2024 Priorities, 65% of respondents identify workforce development as an emerging infrastructure issue.
Workforce development is a broad term encompassing a range of issues. ASTHO responds to these challenges with layered and comprehensive opportunities for leadership development, educational tools on emerging issues, and staff support initiatives. Additionally, ASTHO offers tangible options to build, document, and recognize professional competencies.
Options to Build, Document, and Recognize Professional Competencies
In the last two years, ASTHO has issued digital badges to more than 300 individuals to recognize their wide variety of accomplishments and capabilities. Examples include Diverse Executives Leading in Public Health scholars, facilitators trained to teach people to monitor their blood-pressure at home, a cohort of new supervisors in Kentucky learning the essentials of leadership and management, and a national alliance of subject matter leaders committed to a year of service to impact health equity change.
A digital badge is an electronic micro-credential demonstrating an individual’s attainment of a specific competency or membership of a given peer group. Because there are numerous ways to earn an ASTHO digital badge, each one provides contextual data with customized details for the specific achievement it represents. Once achieved, the recipient can share their digital badge on social media, online resumes, and email signatures to highlight initiatives and skills the badges represent.
ASTHO also offers certificate programs, a second credentialing option, that offers a concentrated and in-depth learning experience centered on an important and timely public health topic. Experienced professionals, seeking to upgrade or update their knowledge and skills with a specialization, interact with subject matter experts, work through topical materials with peers, and demonstrate their learning to earn a certificate. Certificate programs are generally three to six months in length.
In 2023, ASTHO piloted its first certificate program, Building Capacity to Advance Health, resulting in 90% of participants increasing their knowledge of practices on the topic, their ability to incorporate the topical concepts into their work, and their confidence in their ability to take actionable steps relevant to the topic. Examples of other topics conducive for a certificate program are public health communication, firearm injury prevention leadership, tobacco control, succession planning, stigma reduction, among others.
ASTHO staff provide support with program development and execution. With appropriate resources, these credentials can be developed within a relatively short time frame of six months, allowing ASTHO to continue its responsiveness to identified workforce needs of S/THAs.
Lastly, credentials, whether they are customized digital badges or specialized certificates, document individual and aggregated attainment of specific skills, knowledge, and abilities. Not only do credentials build capacity and strengthen jurisdictions, but credentialing numbers can provide indicators of reach and impact of various initiatives.
Credentialing helps develop, document, and promote organizational competencies. Please email requests or suggestions of new program ideas of topics important in your jurisdiction to dld@astho.org.