Staff Training and Professional Development

We are facing an unknown future that at this moment looks bleaker than I have ever seen, although despair isn't a road that I'm willing to go down.  Like us here at TNOYS, all of you are dedicated to serving vulnerable children, youth and families and have likely done this work, in some capacity, all of your professional life!  People often say, "Oh that must be so rewarding." It is rewarding but it would be dishonest to say the work that all of you do is easy, it simply is not.  Our work is about helping people and people are complex.

Most of our young pople have survived a lifetime of hurt, sorrow, unimaginable violence and repeated violations of safety and trust.  Relationships are key to supporting these vulnerable youth in uncovering their strengths and assisting them to successfully navigate adolescence to young adulthood.  Therefore, professionals must be preapred to engage in this incredibly vital and challenging work.  If I burn the fries at McDonald's I can toss them out and start over.  In fact, I can do this at least several more times before my boss probably decides that it's just not working and lets me go.  Service providers don't have this luxury.  We need to get it right with those we serve with the money currently afforded to us and any monies that come our way in the future.

It is no doubt difficult to do more with less.  Often, one of the ways that we deal with shrinking budgets is to reduce training for our professional youth service providers.  It certainly is tempting to do because training isn't a tangible service being delievered directly to youth.  I would ask that you take a moment to reconsider sacrificing such a critical component to ensuring that youth serving programs are delievered at the highest quality possible.  Programs are not people but they are developed, implemented and facilitated by people.  I believe that without ongoing training and staff development we will fall short of helping young people reach their maximum potential.

Good intentions, alone, are not enough to achieve the positive outcomes we work so hard to accomplish with those we serve.  Consequences of an untrained workforce trypically result in a higher rate of employee turnover, staff taking more sick days and overall burn out.  So are we really saving if training is taken out of the equation?  I don't think so.  Everything comes with a cost but people aren't french fries.  Although, as you know too many of our young people will say that they have been treated just like something that can be thrown away.  Training is a mechanism and tool to bolster our competencies in order to do our very best with these complex, resilient and pretty amazing young people.

I recently read an interesting article that speaks to the importance of pre-service and in-service training for staff that you may want to check out.  To find it go to Research to Results-Child Trends.
-MM