Supporting Transportation Workforce Development Through Effective Training Need Assessment

The Florida Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) is a statewide program to improve the skills and increase the knowledge of the local transportation workforce through training, technical assistance, and technology transfer. Each year, the Florida LTAP Center conducts an annual training needs assessment to ensure successful and effective training delivery to meet the needs of the statewide workforce. An effective needs assessment is critical to the success of the Florida LTAP Center in multiple areas, including understanding statewide training needs and distribution, emphasizing the training Focus Areas in FHWA LTAP Strategic Plan, and helping to identify local agency interests on other training resources. To effectively capture local training demand, the Florida LTAP Center has been using a multi-faceted approach to define an appropriate training topic pool to be included in the survey, along with a list of topics covering sufficient breadth but not excessively long. Overall the needs assessment covers training topics in six categories: Safety, Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSM&O), Planning, Infrastructure Management, Workforce Development, and Heavy Equipment Training.

The needs assessment is distributed statewide primarily via online platforms. For each of the past three years, the Center has been able to collect 135-170 responses and data analysis was conducted to breakdown statistics and visualizations by each of the seven FDOT Districts. Based on the collected responses, the most popular training topics in each of the six categories were included in the work plan of next grant cycle. It has proved to be a successful approach to maintaining the high performance of the Florida LTAP Center operations. Within the past five years of the program, the Florida LTAP Center has offered 252 webinars with an average attendance of 291 people and an average rating above 4.5 (out of 5) for both content and instructors, with a significant amount of positive feedback received. This presentation will discuss the importance of a needs assessment in supporting Florida’s workforce development, the development process of the needs assessment survey, survey response collection, data analysis and major findings on top training needs by category, and incorporation of these findings in LTAP annual work plan for effective training delivery to more attendees. Treated as a case study, this presentation can also benefit the conference audience by showing them how an effective customer-oriented survey can support the success of a program, how to collect sufficient survey responses through multiple approaches and with partners’ assistance, and how a data-driven analysis approach can pave the path to the success.