Redesigning College Professional Development Resources to Meet the Needs of Emerging Public Health Professionals

Abstract

The University of South Florida, College of Public Health, is dedicated to providing career planning and professional development services for students in varying formats. However, changing public health training needs and an emerging need for focused attention on professional development necessitated the development of an evaluative program to better understand our students’ needs in these areas. Specifically, anecdotal student feedback about feeling unprepared professionally and survey feedback from students, preceptor feedback regarding the need for students to be better trained in core professional concepts, and low rates of attendance in standard professional development events resulted in a quality improvement study to identify students’ perceived career planning and professional development needs. Findings were used to redesign current services and provided the basis for developing more targeted trainings to ensure that public health graduates are better prepared to meet employer expectations and to excel in the workforce. This article provides an overview of this transformative process, including the results of the qualitative survey on student, faculty, alumni, and community preceptor perspectives, and resulting prototypes developed for the professional development pilot along with preliminary insights.