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February 2016
Policy&Practice
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n human services our workforce
is our greatest asset and also our
largest organizational expense.
The costs are not just in payroll,
but also in recruiting, training,
and retaining staff. Within
one program in Texas (Family and
Protective Services), where turnover
is high, the cost to the agency for each
staff person that left was $54,000 for
a total cost to the program of $72.7
million in 2013 (Sunset Staff Report,
June 2014).
Creating a competent, stable, well-
trained workforce to provide quality
services is a priority for all agencies.
An effective and efficient training and
development program is critical to
that endeavor. In turn, these programs
need to be staffed by competent indi-
viduals with state of the art knowledge
and skills. For more than 30 years,
the National Staff Development and
Training Association (NSDTA), an
affiliate of the American Public Human
Services Association (APHSA), has
filled that role as the primary profes-
sional association for human service
training and development.
Complex social problems, with
changing mandates and priorities,
require a timely and appropriate
response to ensure a well-trained,
human service workforce. As a
result, human service training and
development professionals need
expertise in several fields: human
service program knowledge, a broad
range of skills related to human
performance and organizational
improvement, and the ability to use a
variety of delivery modalities.
An increasing body of research is
clarifying the relationships among
training, organizational develop-
ment, workforce issues, and client
outcomes suggesting the need for an
ecological perspective on workforce
development. We need to pay attention
to organizational development that
goes outside the scope of traditional
classroom training to focus on orga-
nizational performance improvement
and to adopt comprehensive evaluation
strategies to increase accountability
and provide evidence of the effective-
ness of specific approaches.
Like the human service field as
a whole, the training and develop-
ment system is experiencing constant
change and is nested in a broader
contextual context. Effective programs
use a variety of modalities, including
e-learning, to overcome time, distance,
See NSDTA on page 28
How the National Staff
Development and Training
Association is providing
a resource for the human
service field
By Freda Bernotavicz
Freda Bernotavicz
is a senior research
associate at the
University of
Southern Maine’s
Muskie School of
Public Services.
Illustration via Veer
Key
The
to
unlocking
a STRONGER WORKFORCE
I