Workforce Planning: Incorporating Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals

MONA POBLETE:
Hello! Good afternoon, or maybe good morning. My name is Mona Poblete, I'm a Senior Analyst here at ASTHO, and we are so excited to have you for our webinar. Our webinar today is Workforce Planning: Incorporating Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals.

So just, we would like to get to know you, so if you were able to place in the chat your name, your position, and health department, that would be great, just to see who's in the room with us. If you're not able to do that, you can also rename yourself with those three things. So again, name, position, and health department.

Some other housekeeping things. This is webinar style, so if you have any questions, feel free to place them in the chat or the Q&A box. We'll get back to those questions later, because we will have a Q&A portion of the webinar, and you can continue to put those questions in there, and we'll get to them eventually. And lastly, if you're, you're interested in closed captioning, there is a CC button on the bottom of your Zoom taskbar, so you can go ahead and turn that on if you're… you would like.

Alright, some session objectives. So today, we're going to go over these three objectives. You'll be able to learn about processes for establishing job descriptions and prioritize applicable and cross-cutting competencies. You will learn how to incorporate these competencies to establish role clarity and complement training plans. And lastly, discuss how to incorporate the core competencies into your expectations, training plans, assessments, and culture of learning at agencies with a goal of sustainability.

And we have a lot of speakers today. We've got Sonja Ambuster and Ron Bialik from the Public Health Foundation to kick us off, and then we'll have a panel of three different jurisdictions. We have Brenna Davidson from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, Tom Kollmer from Public Health… sorry, from the Kentucky Department of Health, and lastly, Keshana Owens-Cody from the New York State Department of Health.

And with that, I will go ahead and bump it over to Sonja and Ron from Public Health Foundation to talk a little bit about what they're doing.

RON BIALEK:
Thank you so much, Mona, and thank you, everybody, for participating today. We really appreciate it. Sonja and I are going to start us off by taking a few minutes to provide some background about the core competencies for public health professionals and their uses in the field, and then we're going to spend most of our time hearing from our panelists from Kentucky, Missouri, and New York.

So the core competencies themselves were developed by the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice, which is a consensus-driven collaborative of 23 national public health practice academic organizations focused on workforce development. And so you can see ASTHO, for instance, is one of the organizations as a member of the Council on Linkages. The Public Health Foundation, we convene the Council, and we also serve as its staff. We're not a member, so that we can remain a neutral party convening this group. The Council on Linkages is the steward for the core competencies, and it's one of our main products for the work of the Council, and the core competencies are meant to be a set of competencies designed to reflect foundational or cross-cutting knowledge and skills for all public health professionals, whether engaged in public health practice education, or research. It's really meant to apply across the board.

And over the 30-plus years that the Council has been addressing the core competencies, there have been several versions, as you can see on this screen. Every 3 years, based on input received from the public health community, the Council on Linkages determines if there's a need and a time right now to revise the competencies.

The current version of the competencies were adopted in 2021. The Council in 2024, determined that there was no need at the time to Update the core competencies. So the current version of the competencies contains 56 competency statements and numerous sub-competencies that describe the knowledge and skills for working in public health. These are organized under the eight domains that you see on your screen.

The core competencies are widely used by public health agencies throughout the country. They're used in a variety of ways, including guiding development of job descriptions, performance objectives, competency assessments, training needs assessments, education and training, and so on. They're really meant to support activities to advance the growth of our public health professionals.

In addition, the core competencies are incorporated into Healthy People 2030, PHAB Standards and Measures, the Train Learning Network, and many other national initiatives.

You can learn more about the core competencies through a free online training that we recently released. This is something that the public health community have been asking us for a while. We got around to putting it together. We released this in August of last year, and we've had more than 1,100 people who've taken the training. And actually, if you want to learn more from Brenna later, there are a couple of clips from her in that training as well.

So I'd now like to turn this over to Sonja, who can talk about some of the work she's been doing with health departments to help them integrate the core competencies into their workforce development efforts. Sonja?

SONJA AMBRUSTER:
Awesome, thanks, Ron. All right, so I hope all of you have clicked into the resources and have seen the core competencies document, and maybe you said, wow, this is 25 pages. Where do I start? How do I use these? And we're really going to talk about that. We're talking about how are people using this work, and our three panelists have great stories that they're going to share here shortly. I'm just gonna share 4 more slides with you to think about how people have used these core competencies to prioritize, to use them as an assessment driver, and to develop the training plans and integrate them into their workforce development plan overall. So, that's where we're headed here.

So, I could talk for an hour about how to do core competency prioritization, but I'm trying to do this in under 2 minutes. So, I just want to explain that one of the reasons, let's talk about what it is. So, when we talk about prioritization, what has happened with numerous agencies now, including two of the agencies who are speaking today, and several others I've worked with, we've gotten our staff together and said, okay, where are the cross-cutting shared kinds of roles? And so, most health departments will say, we have a lot of people who are clinical services providers, we have a lot of people who are data drivers or use data, we have a lot of frontline programmatic staff, we have division directors and program managers, and we bring together those, different roles. And we create, staff-led, focused conversations in sort of a focus group kind of style, where the group together says, okay, as I think about what the skills I need to be able to do the best job as someone who's a data driver in this organization, and I look at this list of 56 competencies.

I'm, of course, in some way, I'm using all the competencies, but there are probably 8 to 12 of them that are really core to what I do every day. And so we prioritize that process, and so you can see some flip charts on this screen that, for example, in the communication skills domain, this was a group that met in person, and they said, okay, there's four sub… there's four competency statements in the communication skills domain, which of these two is most critical to the role that we play? And so I prioritized that.

And then, during the…there was a second conversation where we went from a list of about 22 competencies down to, alright, what are our top 8 to 10? Why is it useful to prioritize? One, the conversation that people have while they are talking about, how does this apply to my job, people leave and say the best things on evaluations. Like, they write, I thought this was not going to be fun. And it turns out I'm feeling really, really informed at the end. I mean, when people look at their calendar and say, I'm going to a two-hour meeting about core competencies for public health, I mean, not all people get as excited about it as I might. And it's, like, it's overwhelming the number of comments we got on evaluations, where I feel so much better informed about public health, what my role is related to this, how I get to help make the driver changes for how we're going to design our workforce development plan, so we just get really positive feedback, and people leave feeling better informed? And what I love about it is it can drive us down to a, take us from 56 ideas we want to make progress on to 8 to 10.

This is a big table, but this is an example of a list of, roles. So across this dark blue stripe at the top, you see there were project specialists at this health department, there were program support staff, they had data drivers, they had people who were, like, frontline client support, check-in, check-out type folks, and so they have these different groups. And these were the priorities that each of those groups selected. And what you can see in green is where you see all of them said communication with internal and external audiences is really important, and all of us see that it's important to be responding to emerging needs.

Well, if I'm trying to design the workforce development plan, and I'm looking at all of the universe of trainings that are out there. I can say, you know, we should really do something that design… for the whole staff around internal and external communication. How do we want to be more effective internally with communication? I have yet to meet an agency public health or anything else where people said, we have it all figured out with internal communication. I mean, there is always room to grow, and so figuring out what's the role for everyone to play in that, how do we train them up, and how do we help people, figure out how to do responding to, emerging needs? So, this helps us see some cross-cutting things, and then we can also do an assessment based on just the competencies that that group said. So instead of answering 56 questions on a Likert scale, how competent do you feel about these 56 ideas? Instead, the staff can say, how competent do I feel about these 10 that are specific to my job? And it makes the competency assessment way faster for staff, and more useful for the design team, because then we can look at this and say, hey, what did these… and this is an example from Sedgwick County Health Department, where I worked for 10 years, so I love that they're still doing this work, you know, establishing relationships, within the Domain 5 Community Partnership Development, 10, the most, said, this is an area where I think I need more training. Yes. I would like to have more training in this area. Well, that helps us understand that that might be more important to this group of client support people than investing in collecting quantitative and qualitative data, where only 5 people said, yeah, I would like more training in that. So, it's helpful to direct the training plans.

And I just wanted to put a plug in for training plans. There's, as many of you, I'm sure, are aware, there's a lovely resource from PHAB with a template for designing a workforce development plan that offers you kind of the structure. But I know when I was designing any kind of plan for my agency, it was so much nicer when I could see, how does somebody else do this? And, there are workforce development plans from several different health departments of different kinds on PHF's website, and there's a link to that on the screen and in the chat. And you can, see how other people are doing it.

What I think you'll see, especially I can… since I use Sedgwick County as an example, in Sedgwick County, you can see that there was a straight-line connection between… we did a prioritization process, we assessed them based on those priorities, we identified gaps, and we… like, they designed a four-session specific communication, internal and external communication training for all staff based on that assessment. Like, they carried it all the way through. So when you say, how do you know you were doing a good job? They know because they conducted it, they did evaluations of each of the trainings, there was an answer to that question. So, I think that's all we wanted to say in terms of background. Let's get to our panelists, so we can drop the slides now.

And I want to invite our panelists to the screen. I'm going to ask them to say their name and their jurisdiction, and we're going to go in alphabetical order by state. So, Kentucky.

TOM KOLLMER:
Alright, hello everybody. Well, I almost froze there. So, my name's Tom Kollmer, I'm from the Kentucky Department for Public Health.

And… What else was I supposed to say, Sonja? Alright.

AMBRUSTER:
What's your job title?

KOLLMER:
Oh, I'm the, I'm the branch manager of a… it's a public health education design and development branch. We changed our name, we were the Education and Workforce Development, but, we have a new name. So, same, same job.

AMBRUSTER:
How many of us have had that, a new name, for the same job? That's awesome. Thanks, Tom. All right, let's hear from Missouri.

BRENNA DAVIDSON:
Hi folks, it's Brenna Davidson. I'm the Operational Excellence Leader for the State of Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. I don't really have a good job title that actually, like, encompasses what I do. Operational Excellence is all, you know, that's broad enough, but I'm also the Chief of the Office of Performance Management, and I dabble in the workforce world.

AMBRUSTER:
We're lovely to have you. Keshana from New York, tell us about you.

KESHANA OWENS-CODY:
Hi, everybody. My name is Keshana Owens-Cody, and I'm the Division Director for Public Health Infrastructure. So I manage the awesome, Public Health Infrastructure Grant, and am the named Workforce Director on the grant.

Nice to meet you all!

AMBRUSTER:
Awesome, nice to meet you, and I love how these three just introductions tell us a story about how the role of workforce coordination falls in lots of different offices and structures across different agencies, across different states, and all other levels. So, thank you all. All right, you guys know what our first question is, and I'm gonna… I'm gonna go in that same order for this question.

So, Tom, I'm coming to you. How are you incorporating these core competencies, or trying to incorporate them into your workforce planning, or job descriptions, or performance evaluations? So, how's that going for you now?

KOLLMER:
That's a great question. It's everywhere, so, I mean, that's really the truth of it. We are one of the states that uses trains, so in all of our trainings, we make sure that we incorporate the core competencies, and that those are listed on the, on TRAIN itself. So, for the learning management system, people can look up very specific courses that meet, you know, the requirements based on the competencies themselves. We're working on trying to get those into job descriptions. That's kind of a lofty goal, that we're really, you know, down the road, that's one of our bigger focuses, I would say. You know, right now, on an individual level, I try to put those in with our staffs, like, within my branch, but, you know, as that rolls out to everybody else, that will probably take a long time.

AMBRUSTER:
Thanks, Tom.

Brenna, what's it look like at your place for incorporating those competencies?

DAVIDSON:
I'm gonna… I'm gonna give you… I'm the cautionary tale, on this panel, and I… I was… when I got the invite from Asta, I was like, I don't know if you guys want me to talk about this, and… but I think… I think there's value in explaining to our peers of, like where things can go off the rails. Not that we're off the rails, and it's not too late, we are working on this, but right now, you saw on Sonja's last slide, we have a beautiful plan. I'm very proud of the plan we put together in partnership with Sonja and Ron and our friends at the Foundation. We worked really hard, and we used that competency assessment to really understand what should we focus on, how does this turn into a training plan? It's laid out there, but due to, like, you know, unstable leadership, a lot of turnover, if you don't have that structure in place to take that plan and start doing it and implementing it, it's like, it's the best laid plans of mice and men, right? So, we're at this moment now where I'm a couple years after that project, where the plan is finished, it's live, we've been tracking performance, it's been stagnant, so we want to have this clarity around the job description and with the, core competencies as our tentpole between the plan to reality, to training to living it. That is… that is the… the goal. We're at to the point where I'm focused on job descriptions right now, so we don't have consistent job descriptions across our whole agency, and that's very scary to think about. Some descriptions… some roles, like each one of our roles, tend to have very, you know, clear descriptions, but we really need to figure out how do we get a system that starts with the core competencies, but has clarity around what good looks like in every single role. How do you know you're supposed to succeed if you don't know what you are expected to do? How can we hold people accountable for performance if we don't have anything to back it up? And then, how do we find resources and connect folks to always being able to continually improve and develop in their role with those training plans around the core competencies? So. That's the dream. We're building the team now to make it happen, and I'm starting small, building off of the job descriptions, I'm sorry, the job categories that we did in our plan with those priority competencies, building our descriptions around the categories, because that's the first hill. We gotta get folks to understand that you have a functional title, you have a classification as a state employee, and you are also part of a job category. Did you know that?

So that's where we are. Missouri, I'm willing to share, but I want you, everybody on this webinar, to understand best laid plans can go off the rails if you don't have the structure backing it up, and these folks on this panel have the resources for you.

AMBRUSTER:
Awesome, thanks, Brenna. That's, I love the connection between reality and, and what our plans are, because we've all been in that space.

And reconnecting and re-driving and infrastructure, and, you know, there's lots of reports that talk to us as a related topic around turnover, and how important that having the infrastructure of people, makes a big difference.

Alright, Keshana, will you tell us about how New York is incorporating core competencies?

OWENS-CODY:
Yeah, so I'll… I'll kind of go back, like how Brenna, you just did. Interesting enough, when we discovered, I'll say, the public health core compet… or the public, yeah, public health core competencies, we were in the midst of our strategic planning efforts, so, PHIG was also coming into play. So we spent, I… I'm the lead alongside, two of my colleagues that lead the workforce, workgroup for the strategic planning.

And at the same time, we were also, you know, reviewing PH WINS data. I think we were even getting ready to promote PH WINS and getting our staff to be able to participate in that. We were diving deep into public health foundational capabilities and the PHAB accreditation, and then we discovered public health core competencies, and it was like, huh, like, so it was very exciting for us.

I will say, like, as you know, with any, you know, strategic planning, work groups, coalitions you're bringing together, there's that storming and norming and forming phase that you're in. So this actually helped us to bring focus to the work that we were doing. So we… we split the work groups, the work group was split up into three subcommittees. One was focused on recruitment, the other one was focused on workforce and training and development for public health, and employee engagement. So we were able to then dive deeper into those core competencies and figure out how does that help us shape our focus of the work group. So, in terms of job descriptions, we have been able to at least pilot, like, so I'll actually even give some context of, like, who's in these work groups, too. So, we have, staff, frontline staff, we have, we have managers, we have directors, and then we also invited some subject matter experts. So, we've invited our health equity office, we also invited our human resource team, because this is a lot of time, you know, this is the work that they're, you know, most of the time leading, and have policies and procedures, and we wanted to make sure that we had an understanding of, you know, where they're coming from as well, but kind of bringing these two groups together, to be able to talk about, things. What's also nice, and about that space was we've all shared the story of being hired, we have all, all of us have job descriptions and responsibilities, so that led us to have a, a great conversation of, like, what that experience is like for us, too. So, we have been, you know, providing different resources around incorporating the core competencies into your job descriptions, what that could look like in your performance reviews as well, and then we've also developed, similar to what you, you shared that, with the, the resources around training and development. We've also designed some training and development guides, or we call it the Public Health Learning Portfolio, that incorporates the core competencies and identifies trainings to fit in those respective boxes. So, I would say it helps, really, to, like, if you're in a strategic planning space as well, and you have workforce, this could be a great framework or great resource to help guide and give you focus there.

AMBRUSTER:
Thank you so much. I can tell you, I can see that it's music to both Ron and me, to hear someone say it. The competency's helping structure and focus. And I love that. I love your statement there. And thank you for that description, and a nice, clean connection to PHIG, which I suspect is a connection for many of us on the call, seeing the connection between workforce development, core competencies, the work from PHIG.

Alright. So, question two, and you guys are right on schedule for my, like, middle breakdown of time here. So, we all know there are barriers. There are lots of them. What I'm interested in are things that have helped you make progress. Like, what has helped you get started, or keep it going, or structure? And I'm gonna change up the order. Let's go, Brenna, Keshana, Tom. So, Brenna, like, what has helped you make progress on, using and integrating the core competencies?

DAVIDSON:
I wouldn't say we have a ton of, like, actual, like, written-down products that are pro- progress. I must have said products, but I think too many words. Anyway…yet. But when I said, like, it's not too late, it is not too late to get this back together, right? So, we were at the beginning of our PHAB reaccreditation cycle, which was the impetus to get this, workforce development plan put together, and we wanted it to be high quality, and we're in the mid-cycle now, so we are re-accredited. And so it is not too late, and through performance management, you should always do iterative improvements. That's the whole point of the cycle, right? So, we are, right now, I'm designing a project plan that is, how are we launching job descriptions across the department? Because another cautionary tale, we kind of started with the template. We're like, okay, we'll just spell out this template in Word. It's really simple, right? And then we realized, we have 1,900 team members, and they do so many different things, and even our leadership was like, this and this are going to be huge issues, and we're like, oh, you're right. So, we can kind of, like, give it half the effort we need to give it, or we can do it right, and do it in a thoughtful way, back it up to the competencies. So, I am right now building a project plan that will be launched in probably next month, and will run through the end of the year, and the goal is to have 75% of our department team members with a job description that has the core competencies in it.

So, starting with our data, what's the most, largest job classifications that we have, and then how does that translate into our categories, and then what are those priorities? That turns into the training plan. We have a new workforce development team that's being assembled as we speak, and so those folks are not going to be able to hit the ground running without any sort of structure, so we can re-update, and we should, and we will update our Workforce Development Plan implementation plan, because that's 2 years old now. That's old news. We need to live that and change those goals. And then we need to incorporate this project into it. So, I think the lesson is, is make sure you've got consistent teams that understand the vision and have been there along the way. You can't hand this off to somebody and be like, see ya, bye! That's not how this works. We are one team here, and then, running it like a project is really the important part. I think you have to have phases, you have to have goals, you have to have role clarity, and the people that are running it need to be empowered to run it, too.

AMBRUSTER:
So I'm hearing one driver was PHAB accreditation, really, you know, launching that, and then following through with that, and project teams, and plans. They have to keep going. Awesome. Thanks, Brenna.

Keshana, what's helping you make progress?

OWENS-CODY:
Yeah, I'm gonna actually say the workgroup itself, I feel like we were very motivated, so I'll stem off of Brenna, because I feel like a lot of the things you said, I could echo, but I'll go with the workgroup itself, is that they were… we were all motivated, we were problem solvers, we were researching, and again, this is on top of everything else we're all doing in public health. So, I would say we leaned into that space. We definitely had project plans, as we said, tracking. But as we mentioned too, both we… so we have the PHAB accreditation as well, but also, we had strategic planning work goals, that were clear. We made adjustments, we made pivots as we, navigated, because maybe we couldn't, you know, get through this specific goal, but we will pivot, and, the group kind of decided, you know, on what that direction would be. But we also had PHIG at the same time. We also are responding to those different initiatives as well. So I would say there were kind of three drivers driving all of this, and what we did, too, during these groups is we made sure that we share all these different areas, even some of our state mandates as well. There might be some state activities that, we're working towards, too, that are supporting these initiatives as well. So we made sure to kind of call those out in the room, like, here are all the different areas that we're supporting, our state health department's priorities, on top of our PHAB accreditation, our health equity plan, like, there's a lot of different areas that we were able to, help everybody see, like, we're driving all these different initiatives to that. So, I'll say the collaboration of the work group, the spirit of the work group, and again, as I mentioned, the makeup of the work group was, not just HR and our program managers, but it also was frontline staff and middle managers, all coming together collectively to, work on, you know, how do we… this helped in a lot of different ways, too, in terms of even recruitment.

I know I talked about job descriptions and things, but, it also goes that back layer of, like, how do we even, engage applicants and candidates into wanting to even work in public health as well. So the core competencies also helped us to drive what is said inside of those, those ads that we're putting out, those, where we're putting them on LinkedIn, or we're putting them in, you know, indeed, all those different areas, we were able to pull some of those into that direction as well. So we've had some focused conversations about that in our work groups, too.

AMBRUSTER:
Thanks. I love that you started with teams, because it does, like, it's so much richer and so much more fun to do the work when you're in… there's so much wisdom that comes from the team. It also slows things down, because it always does, and it's richer as a result. And I love the tight connection to strategic planning and PHIG, because you know, it… it should be integrated into strategic plans. I mean, we all have seen the standards that drive and say that there needs to be a workforce connection and strategic plan, so that can be a super… a driver for success. Thanks.

Alright, Tom? Let's drive across.

KOLLMER:
So that's a great question. So, we're at a point now, I think I would like to highlight that, back to what, Brian actually said about it kind of being slow. So, we started this back in 2022. So, you know, at this point, we've kind of hit a place where things have slowed down because we're sort of outside of it, in a way. So, but I think the big thing that did drive it was a lot of our teams, and a little bit of stubbornness, to a point, you know, because we put ourselves in a position where we had this really lofty goal, that we were trying to reach, where we wanted to come up with. For our assessment, we wanted to come up with a scenario-based assessment, and that is an almost impossible task, and we ended up using PHIG to, you know, talk to Ron and Sonja again about the assessment piece, and the, you know, coming up with scenarios so that we could actually get and determine people's… how well they do towards each of those competencies, that's a bigger goal than anybody here could accomplish at the time. But, you know, we were able to, you know, do all of our assessment pieces and get those together, and then figuring out, you know.

Yeah, we still have a lot of the data, and we need to, we still need to continue to use it. The other big thing here that I do want to say is, so we used ours internally for the… at the state-level Department for Public Health. Our local health departments, that's kind of our next piece, is figuring out how to get those out to everybody across the state.

If you're not familiar with Kentucky, it's a very long state, so, you know, you can be 4 hours or more away from somebody else in the same state. So, you know, that kind of creates its own barriers, and, you know, we do have some work groups that we're working on that, but, you know, as I'm sitting here in this meeting, I'm sort of getting revitalized, because I'm like, man, I really need to push this more and get this going again, so, you know, that's when that stubborn piece comes into play, I think. You know, it's just not letting it…everything that we do, and all of the work that we have on our day-to-day basis, this is extra on top of it, and so making sure that this continues, it just kind of takes…a little bit of, you know, we can do it attitude, and some people behind you that are gonna push you and say, hey, let's get this done, and keeping it together.

AMBRUSTER:
Thanks, Tom. I'm totally loving the idea that one driver for success is stubbornness and grit. Like, we just have to stick to it, man, and we just have to keep doing it. And there's so much truth to that. I'm pretty sure, like, I haven't seen cute stickers from my water bottle cup that say, like, stubbornness is the way to go, but it's so true.

Alright, one of the things you mentioned there related to data is where we're headed next, and Keshana, I'm gonna come to you first.

If anybody's been in a performance management training with me before, or a QI training, I basically have boiled this down to, how do you know when you're doing a good job? So, like, it's just pretty basic. What are you measuring to track your success as it relates to workforce?

OWENS-CODY:
Yeah, so as it relates to the core competencies and everything that we're talking about, right now, I would say, in terms of tracking our progress and even, like, our next steps forward, you know, Tom, you just mentioned getting to the local health departments. That's where we're seeing that we need to go next, and I did see, when I peeked in the chat, I seen a lot of our local health departments, so I'm excited, to bring this down to you all as well, and share our lessons learned. I think that our… in terms of tracking our progress, it's… it's looking back to see, you know, how our, the new job descrip… you know, if anybody has the job descriptions that have the new core competencies, working with managers and understanding, you know, is… has… is it now more clear for, applicants and for staff to understand what their roles are? How are you incorporating that into performance? Are you seeing a shift in the move, in your perform… like, maybe there's a new core competency that's a focus. I know that's a big thing for me personally. When I do my performance evaluations, I'm looking to see, like, okay, maybe they've, you know, they've accomplished this one. What's the next one that we want to add? So I think that our our next steps definitely are going to be, I would say, championing this forward, because I think our PHIG team has definitely embraced this. Our champions that are inside of the strategic planning have also embraced this, but also just, you know, continuing to circulate this, continuing to support our human resource team in seeing this, and how this is a resource to provide language.

Because I… I feel like that that's what helped with this, too, is sometimes you don't know what to write when you're writing jobs. Like, I shouldn't say it that way, but we… we… our work is so complex, and this, these, you know, definitions of the different areas, especially depending on what role you're in. It was even… not to say I want… that people copy-paste, but it was easy to, like, you know, okay, this completely fits this specific job description. So I think that, you know, that's the direction that we're going to be going into, is really, you know, figuring out how do we measure the progress. We know that our… a key stakeholder is going to be working with managers and and helping them understand this and how they can pull this in, but then also progress along the way. Like, it doesn't stop at, now we got them at the job descriptions, and we got them at the performance reviews, but how do we continue to evolve in that space? So, excited about that.

AMBRUSTER:
Awesome, thank you. Alright, thinking about tracking your progress, what's something you're measuring, Tom?

KOLLMER:
So, one of the things I would measure outside of, you know, we can visually see what courses that we have on train or something of that nature, is, you know, we are partnering with a lot of the local universities and colleges, and we are letting them know what our competencies and what the assessment said, so then they can make sure they're teaching the students that we're going to be getting in the next few years, the competencies, and so they come into our workforce already knowing what they need to know.

So, that's one of the really big pieces. We're in the process of that, but, you know, I think as… moving forward, as we start to see people coming in and having more knowledge straight, you know, that is directly related to the job they're trying to get, straight, you know, out of the university level is going to be amazing.

AMBRUSTER:
Yeah, I love the story of the university work that you all are doing to connect, and, you know, how do you know when you're doing that well? Like, are you, are you tracking the number of universities you're working with? What, is… how do you know when you're doing that?

KOLLMER:
That is a great question. So that… we have… there's way more people than myself that are involved in that piece. I'm just one guy. But, you know, we have partnered, you know, through a lot of hard work with almost all of the major universities at this point. I think… and I'm gonna misspeak here, I think we've got 11 across Kentucky that we're partnered with. It could be more than that. I think Jim is on this meeting. That's fantastic. I think I saw his name in the chat, and he would know the exact number, but, you know, it's…it's amazing, the partnership. Like, everything from how well in Kentucky we partner with the universities, to even our relationship from the state level to the local health departments, we all work together in such a great way, so…

Yeah, the academic health department, that's right, Ron.

That's all.

AMBRUSTER:
Thanks, Tom. All right, Brenna, I'm saving you performance management, director to, tell the story of the last. What are you measuring to track success related to workforce?

DAVIDSON:
Well, first, I'm going to say that I'm taking a lot of inspiration from my fellow panelists. The idea of having a partner with your academic says, create a pipeline, duh, of course. I just had a meeting last week where we were lamenting that there's such a great healthcare workforce pipeline, and where's the public health one? Maybe we should build it. So anyway, I love the idea of doing that and incorporating competencies, and then, Keshana, what you were saying about, like, the committee, that's key. Like, that's the driver. So, my cool project plan that I'm noodling on right now about job descriptions, guess what I'm gonna do? Assemble a committee of people from all over the department, all over divisions, all of our classifications, our top tens, or whatever it ends up being. We need a diverse, like, group of voices from all levels to make sure this actually makes sense and will actually apply to our department. Want to edit my former responses with those. My current response to the question about performance is that we are doing it through our performance management system. So, each one of our big plans, the tentpole plans for accreditation, have work plans with very specific goals that are fed into… we use Achieve It.

And so we have, like, plans on plans on plans and achieve it, but we're expanding beyond that. So we're doing performance metrics and, operational, like, progress reporting for our entire department now, which is really great, and that has been a huge push, like, as we speak, we're going live with user training, like, next month, in a couple of weeks. So that is the, big thing here, but we are moving to a culture of metrics for every…so, if you… I know you do good work, I know you do, and you make the most out of the funding that you have, so have the metrics to… so I can brag about it, and I can show exactly how good you are at what you do.

So we're gonna incorporate all of Workforce into that structure. It's already there. And then we also, of course, do the traditional, like, how did… what'd you think about this, this, training? What kind of feedback should we do? What, you know, was it accessible? Was it easy to understand? All of that. We'll always maintain that, and that can be turned into metrics, and so I will make sure that our workforce team, as they are assembling and finding their feet here, understand that OPM, the Office of Performance Management, is here to help, and we are partners here. Not only can we help you implement, we're going to help you track, and we're going to make sure that it's in a spot where it's in the single source of truth, and we're going to be able to show exactly the impact you have.

AMBRUSTER:
I'm loving seeing reactions and joy to, let's measure! So, thank you for that. Alright, so this is the last question for the panel, and then we're gonna go to your questions. I see one question in the chat, I'm sure there are more. We will, hope to get to those. So, in this last question, we're going to take about 5 minutes from all of us.

And I'm gonna go Brenna, Keshana, Tom. Brenna, to what degree were staff involved in the planning and the assessment process?

DAVIDSON:
I would say… So you did an assessment, and you've got a plan, so how are staff involved? To the nth degree, I would say that, they… it was staff-driven, honestly. I, at the time, was… we were at crunch time for accreditation, and so I did not have the time to give it everything that I wanted to give it. But that's why we partnered with the foundation. You guys did such a great job of helping with the facilitation of educating our team members about what is this, why are we doing this, why is this important? And then our communication around, and you said this in the beginning, Sonja, of, like, this is your chance to weigh in on the training plans that we're gonna have for this whole department. Like, this is a form of privilege to have this… to participate in this. And so, that was kind of the messaging that we crafted to get people interested. And then, those 6 job categories that we created, we went to leadership and said, who's a good, you know, when you think about data services, who are you thinking of? And we made sure there were people from each division, so we had 6 different teams that were experts on what they did, able to work with Sonja as, like, it's not Brenna being like, what are you trying to do here? Because they know my… me for many different things, and they're going to be like, you're asking me to do something else, and I'm like, sorry. So, having that third-party facilitation, having it be staff-led was key. And they own the plan that they created.

AMBRUSTER:
Thanks, Brenna. All right, Keshana, how are staff involved?

OWENS-CODY:
Yeah, so being that it was… it was born in the strategic planning, I would say all… all staff, I'll be honest, and say we were one domain area of eight, so every staff had a chance to join, into different work groups, and… and we just were privileged to lead the workforce one. So, so I would say, they definitely had, you know, opportunity to help us with researching and finding different, you know, resources to strengthen, our recruitment and workforce development and employee engagement and recognition, plans. They played a role in strengthening our work plan and our goals and accomplishing a lot of different areas. And then last but not least, each one of these work groups also is creating toolkits and resource guides, so they're a part of that as well. So, they could be on the end of developing it. Definitely providing feedback before it's finalized, before we move it over, to our respective human resource teams and leadership team to get approval to move that forward. So they're kind of, I mean, again, they've been a part of it from the beginning, and we're always also looking for more people to join our specific work groups as well, because we recognize, you know, workloads may impact things, so we're always doing a call-out or out to see if others would like to join our work groups. But staff, no matter what level, they were, they were able, and it was accessible for all.

AMBRUSTER:
Really appreciate that. I love that you have these standing work groups, which helps offer structure, because we talked about the need for that. This is one of those things that's really easy to lose, lose ground on, so having that structure, and then also that you mentioned that there are staff from across all levels, for that engagement piece, that's… that's exciting. I'd love to learn more sometime.

Tom, you had a lot of staff involved, tell us about it.

KOLLMER:
This would be impossible without staff involvement. I mean, that's… we started off, really, with pushing that why we're doing it. You know, we wanted to get their buy-in. There's about 900 people, give or take, within the, the state level of our health department here. And so, you know, we wanted to get as many of them involved as we could to make sure that we had the best data set, and we could give them actual information that would be able to benefit them. So, when we did our original, so we didn't do… this is fun. We didn't do an in-person, setting when we did our prioritization. We actually did ours virtually, which was really neat. We ended up with about 120 to 130 people in total over 7 categories, so, you know, it was very interesting doing it that way, had a lot of involvement, and then we had a great turnout once we did our assessment. Our assessment was right before the PH Wins.

So it was like, we had ours, and PH Wins was right afterwards, so they had a lot of data that they were, you know, that we've gotten from them, and there was a lot of questionnaires at the same time, but, you know, it was huge. You know, the only way that this all works and actually is impactful is having your staff involvement. You know, you get their buy-in and let them understand why we're doing this, you know, people get so many, at least here, I don't know about everywhere, but we get a lot of questionnaires, and people kind of get that questionnaire overload when they're like, oh, another one. So, having one that you can explain, hey, this is meaningful, you know, yes, it's going to take a little bit of your time, but, at the end of it, you know, you had a direct say in, what is important to your job? I mean, who doesn't want to be able to do that?

AMBRUSTER:
Yeah, thanks, Tom. I think at your kickoff, you said you have 900 staff. I think at…

KOLLMER:
Yeah.

AMBRUSTER:
…like that. I think at the kickoff, to say, hey, we're going to work on a workforce development plan, your secretary, Dr. Stack, did a kickoff, I think there were over 400 people on the… on the webinar, and it was, like, just like, here's what's happening, and then people volunteered, like, 130 people volunteered to do these small groups. It was all volunteer. As opposed to all and told. And both work, like, there's a great reason to do both things, but it just happened to be that came forward and said they were interested. And just, if anyone's interested, James has let us know in the chat there about the 13 universities and colleges they're partnering with, for internships and memorandias, MOUs, etc. So, thank you for the help in the chat for that.

Alright, Mona. We are right on schedule for getting some questions from the group, and there are some rich… I can see the chat, but I can't see the Q&A box, just because of what I have pulled up, so…

POBLETE:
I can read the one in the Q&A box.

So this question is coming from Jesse Kramer.

Could anyone share samples or examples of how you incorporated the core competencies into specific training initiatives? We are looking to develop… we are looking at developing career pathways for employees, and would love some guidance on how to proceed.

AMBRUSTER:
All right, who wants to jump in there? They're looking for, connecting this to a specific training initiative, and specifically around career pathways for employees.

KOLLMER:
So, I mean, I guess I'll go. So, we have a few training plans we actually have created on Train that follow you know, what the assessments were and what was important through those assessments. And then that is… so we basically, we took our information, we looked at it and said, these are what the priorities were, and then once we knew that, we did find, we didn't develop any training specifically for it, but we found existing trainings and sort of linked them that way, so that people can go in and take that and get to, you know, the… kind of the next level. That's one example.

I would say the other big one that I think of is, you know, with Eastern Kentucky University, we've got some partnerships with several of the people, like, the high up in the College of, of Health. And so, you know, working with the people there in the public health university. Giving them the information so that they can let their students know directly, hey, you know, this is what you need to know when you're doing this job. We've actually had a few of the professors take that information and the core competencies and what our priorities were, and make sure that that's what they're educating their students on. So, these are two kind of separate examples.

AMBRUSTER:
Yeah, thanks, Tom. Yeah, the courses… if you… if you find courses or design courses to live on Train, they will have core competencies attached to them, and then you can package those in a training plan on train, and then pull and drag, or track your, uptake, who's done it, the agency can pull reports. I've had a train account as a public health professional since, I think…I think it's, 2011, maybe? I mean, like, I have a… I can pull my transcript for everything that I've ever done in that, and all of those courses are tied to core competencies.

Alright, other examples, Keshana or Brenna, if you want to jump in on examples of incorporating the core competencies into specific training initiatives?

DAVIDSON:
I don't have anything that we have done, that is the dream, that's the plan. I just want to say we, we're not gonna go that hard, probably. It's going to be iterative improvements over time. We'll start small, so it may just be a matter of, hey, go check out these learnings, and it could be a quick guide that's a quick link aggregator at this moment. We do have a few barriers where we have a statewide LMS system that is live, but kind of not going great, for our state employees, and so we have to use that system, and so we would… in the future, we could have a learning paths, where we could design our own custom learning paths, so I would love to have a, feature where we have 6 learning paths for six job categories. Hey, welcome, you're new to public health services. Check out this learning path, a bunch of really good training that we put together. So that is the dream, but we are going to start small.

AMBRUSTER:
It's the wise way to go. Keshana?

OWENS-CODY:
Yeah, I would say, so what we did with the… with the core competencies, almost backing up to our… our previous discussion is, one of our teams that's focused on, public health continuing education, they used these core competencies to, build an assessment to assess each of our centers within the Office of Public Health, what their training and development needs were, and then that helped them develop… to, create and release different opportunities for training and development based on that. But they kind of have, like, a work plan almost for each center. They know what the needs are for each of the centers, what training needs exist, and then that's helping them to build training opportunities annually. And in terms of career pathways, I would say this is our area of development. We feel like since we've done this groundwork of working on job descriptions and performance, like, that's the next layer for us, is to figure out how do we now put this kind of all together, if that makes sense.

AMBRUSTER:
Absolutely does, and I'm going to come back to you, Keshana, because there's a question in the chat that I think, you can answer. You talked about using the core competencies for job descriptions. And it was just, asking for, how did you do that? How did you incorporate the core competencies into those job descriptions or the job classifications? Because as Brenna mentioned, you know, we've all got our, institutional job description, which is maybe slightly different than the title that we use in our organization and the actual job… the public health job description that we have. So, how have you done that?

OWENS-CODY:
Yeah, I would say it was, like, really looking at the… once we got into the responsibilities of each role, and kind of looking… almost doing a crosswalk, like, with some positions. Some that we were able to pilot with were the newer positions. Obviously, that's easier, because you can…tt's a little, but then looking at some of the other ones to see… I mean, we even had a robust discussion inside of our work groups on when's the last time you refreshed your job descriptions? And then that's when we were able to really pull the core competencies in to say, does it match current state? So, it's kind of like that, like, it's… if you're in that state of, like, when's the last time I… like, I don't want to say that sometimes we just put, like, we’re… as we're backfilling, we repost quickly, but it's taking that time to actually assess, you know, are these… is everything inside of here, in terms of responsibilities, still current to this date, or do I need to actually pivot and make it more realistic and relevant to today? So, the core competencies also help in that space as well, on top of other things that we were doing too, but that was a really good discussion we had in one of our work groups was, you know, just the revisiting what you've written in the past, and making sure that it's relevant to today. So I would say I… mostly, it was, like, in those responsibility sections, not so much the… I know that there's things that we can't change, but it's like, what are the things that are kind of within our control and confines, and what you're going to be measuring your staff's performance on? So that's where we… we really focused on those areas of responsibilities and the tasks at hand.

AMBRUSTER:
That really helps. Thank you so much. I'm asking, Keshana and Brenna, because James is from the same agency as Tom, so I was just gonna… making that connection. Brenna, did you want to weigh in on the job descript… the… answering that question?

DAVIDSON:
Sure, I mean, I have just, cool print of plans right now. They are on paper, but no one's seen them at me. I think… I'm keeping it simple again, that's the theme. So, at the moment, I'm looking at, okay, we have 6 job categories, but our team members have no idea what that means, because unless they were on those really cool, groups that Sonja facilitated two years ago, they haven't heard about that. So, we're gonna need to do a little education on what's the difference between your classification title, what's the difference between your functional title, and what job category are you in? So, I want to make at least, like, six templates, for job descriptions by category, but then the more I think about it, the more I think it makes sense to go by classification. We're going to figure it out. But what I'm going to do is pipe in, to those templates where we're going to have some input controls, where it's not just the Wild West, everybody can type whatever they want in their job description, we have a little control over that. We're going to pipe in those cross cuttings that apply to everybody, and then the prioritized ones that came out of the workshops and are in our plan. So, we're going to control and make sure those are all there, but it may right now, just be a listing of competencies and a link to more resources. Until we get to a point where we can build a system.

AMBRUSTER:
I think that makes a lot of sense. I really do. I mean, just listing them, I mean, it connects the idea that there is a competency… there is a bigger structure that your job connects to that is part of the public health zeitgeist. Like, it is what… how we do the work collectively, all of us, in public health. All right, Mona, I think we've got one more question.

POBLETE:
Yeah, we have one more question. I think Ron might be answering it already, but I'm gonna say it out loud anyways. This one's from Preeti Acharya from Iowa, and they're wondering if they could get a sample of a performance management dashboard, right? There's so many platforms, Tableau, Qualtrics, RBA, Power BI. Is there a simple Excel template to share where tech is not readily accessible?

BIALEK:
If I can chime in, I was typing it, yes, you should.

POBLETE:
Yeah.

BIALEK:
Until I was doing that, much easier than my typing. You know, we do performance management workshops, and part of that, we designed an Excel spreadsheet that we work with the agency, and then different units within the agency to plug in items there. It's… it's not something, though, readily available, because I think there are instructions, and whatnot that we… that we incorporate into the workshops that we do. But it is, you know, I would highly recommend using Excel.

At the beginning, especially, do not focus on purchasing software. We've had so many health departments we work with where, they say, "well, we bought this X number of years ago, we've never used it. Now what do we do?" And focus on the measure first, and then the technology, and Excel is perfect.

AMBRUSTER:
Agreed. And there's a blog post where one of the agencies we worked with, more than one, I think, but this blog post is from one, where they organized the structure around the foundational public health services model. So, there are lots of ways to structure and organize that performance management system that also tracks your workforce measures.

All right, thanks for all the questions and for the dynamic conversation. I really enjoyed hearing from you all. I feel like I want to have longer conversations with all three of our panelists, so thank you all for that. Great to hear your stories. And, Mona, you have some more announcements.

POBLETE:
I do. Leslie, if we can get that last slide up, awesome, you are so on it. Also, thank you again to all of our presenters and panelists. We really appreciate you guys being here with us today and talking about this, this topic.

On your screens, you will see that there is an evaluation. We love data, so please go ahead, scan that QR code. I just put that BitLink in the chat, so if you just want to access it through there, please fill it out, let us know, how we did, and, if there's any other topics that you would like to see in a webinar. That would be great. In addition, I don't think I have a future webinar date for us yet, but if you have any questions, feel free to email me. I do plan on sending out the recording and the slides and other resources to all the attendees. They'll also be on the PHIG website, so that is something I will work on getting by the, early next week.

Other than that, I don't think I'm missing anything, and no one's telling me I'm missing anything. So, I hope you all have a great rest of your afternoon. Thanks again for coming, and we'll see you at a future webinar.