Executive Summary
PDP ended the 2022–2023 fiscal year in a strong position, operating with a full complement of in-person training programs and an ever-growing and robust catalog of both instructor-led online and fully on-demand courses. This followed significant hiring challenges in the later part of 2022 and early 2023 as the world emerged more fully from the pandemic. PDP had to be creative to meet these challenges. We explored a wide variety of sources and ways to advertise positions, and with the approval of the Research Foundation, introduced a hiring bonus for two position titles that proved particularly difficult to fill. Our efforts and perseverance paid off, and by the end of the 2022–2023 fiscal period, we were seeing positive results with our hiring efforts. During this time, the existing staff worked diligently to keep our deliverables on target.
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 2022–2023 fiscal year, PDP obtained twentytwo awards totaling over $39 million and in the 2021–2022 fiscal year, PDP obtained twenty-one awards totaling over $33 million. 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 lead among the University’s centers in generating a stable level of indirect cost recovery, particularly since resuming normal in-person training operations.
As PDP began the transition back to inperson training deliveries, our staff of over 170 professionals had to revisit and update training programs that had not been delivered in-person for over two years, while continuing to produce new asynchronous online courses and new instructorled/synchronous courses as well. PDP continued to offer an ever-wider range of training programs designed to bolster workforce development. We returned to in-person deliveries and have been back in pre-pandemic mode since 2022. PDP successfully offered 3,391 instructional activities to over 512,224 attendees, figures which track well with previous fiscal period at 3,173 instructional activities offered to over 490,384 attendees. PDP generated over 1,121,899 contact hours of training in its various educational program offerings during 2022–2023 and 921,076 contact hours during 2021–2022.
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, non-government organizations, 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.
For 2022–2023 and 2021–2022, 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 could not be successful without a talented and resolute staff. It is important to acknowledge their many substantial contributions during the last two fiscal years. We navigated the pandemic by learning how to work effectively in remote mode and then we had to figure out how to resume working in-person in a much-changed world. Our work has continued at a fast pace throughout the last two years. PDP’s sponsors eagerly requested a return to in-person programs, while continuing to want more online program delivery too, as the needs of the NYS workforce and the citizens of NYS did not diminish. The NYS workforce also had to help the citizens of NYS navigate a changed post-pandemic world and this presented many challenges that our training programs 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, Penny LaRocque, Michele Reedy, Patricia Seeberger, Edward Skawinski, Bryan Sotherden, John Thompson, and Tiffany Williams-Hart 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.