Executive Summary

The 2023-2024 fiscal year ended with PDP in a strong position, operating with a full complement of in-person training programs, as well as several large training seminars and forums, a large scholarship program, several media projects, and an ever-increasing catalog of both instructor-led online and fully on-demand courses.

PDP maintained consistent levels of funding while continuing to provide high-quality continuing professional education and training programs for the public service workforce throughout New York State (NYS) and beyond. During the 2023-2024 fiscal year, PDP brought in twenty awards totaling over $43 million as compared to twenty-one awards totaling $39 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. For the past three fiscal years, PDP’s consistent level of awards has produced an average indirect cost recovery for the University of $2.8 million. PDP continues to be among the University’s centers high performers in generating a stable level of indirect cost recovery.

With a staff of approximately 200, PDP successfully offered 3,306 instructional activities to over 551,089 attendees, figures which track well with the previous fiscal period at 3,391 instructional activities offered to over 512,224 attendees. PDP generated over 1,259,361 contact hours of training in its various educational program offerings during 2023-2024 and 1,121,899 contact hours during 2022-2023.

The primary focus for PDP staff remains the development and delivery of education and training programs employing the principles of adult learning theory. Our programs are designed to produce effective workforce development outcomes to support on-going employee growth and skills building, while continuing to meet agency-specific needs. PDP’s offerings cover a wide range of subject matter areas and primarily support employees who work in the social and human services fields.

PDP programs continued to effectively assist various state, local government, and not-for-profit workers and organizations to improve their overall job knowledge, skills, and abilities. This results in an improved and more productive workforce for the people of New York State. PDP will continue to maintain its high educational and professional standards to ensure quality control over all offerings. The organization uses various evaluation modalities to verify that these offerings effectively meet the education and training needs of our participants. PDP’s accreditation by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET), which allows us to issue IACET Continuing Education Units (CEUs) is also an important value-added dividend for our training audience.

For 2023-2024, most of PDP’s program delivery addressed employees of the NYS Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), the NYS Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), the NYS Office of Employee Relations (OER), numerous local government agencies throughout NYS, as well as early child care providers statewide. The primary program areas included child welfare training, early childhood education and training, temporary assistance policy training, and computer and information technology training, along with others. PDP’s overall sustainability continues to be strong as it expands its delivery of high-performance programs for the public service workforce in NYS and beyond. We value the partnerships we have with our sponsors and will continue to collaborate closely with them on innovative program design and delivery.

Our programs would never be successful without PDP’s talented and resolute staff. It is important to acknowledge their many substantial contributions during the last fiscal year. Our work has continued at a fast pace throughout the last year, as our sponsors requests and the needs of the NYS workforce and the citizens of NYS did not diminish. While PDP successfully underwent a period of rebuilding of its training staff post-pandemic, many of the local districts we serve throughout NYS have been rebuilding their staff levels in a post-pandemic world as well and this presented many challenges that our training programs have helped them to address.

As we look ahead to the next fiscal year, I want to take this opportunity to recognize PDP Director Deborah McGuire for her on-going dedicated leadership and vision and the PDP Management Team: James Bonville, Michael Cozzens, Colleen Faragon, Diane Hodurski-Foley, Marcella Junco, Penny LaRocque, Michele Reedy, Patricia Seeberger, Edward Skawinski, Bryan Sotherden, and John Thompson for excellent leadership of their respective program areas. And PDP could not accomplish all that we do without our talented program supervisors, trainers, curriculum/course designers and developers, program evaluators, IT staff, computer programmers, finance, and program support staff. We are all looking forward to continued success in the year ahead.

— June A. Mastan, Ph.D.