NEHA January/February 2024 Journal of Environmental Health

ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE

We also determined that use of the NCS would enable us to compare our findings to the survey of training needs conducted by IFPTI in 2012. Our approach was to use the NCS to assess the perceived relevance of and exposure to key knowledge areas among retail food safety professionals. This empha- sis on relevance and exposure allowed us to design an assessment that could collect more than just general information on which train- ings people wanted but to find out —regard- less of availability—what training was needed . The NCS has been divided into four dis- tinct job levels (i.e., entry, journey, technical, leadership), allowing us to map our under- standing of training needs onto the NCS. With our needs assessment, we could exam- ine knowledge areas by job level, enabling training planners and providers to tailor training to specific levels. Our goal was to understand issues like how to avoid over- whelming entry-level professionals with too much information too soon or how to focus on knowledge areas that are needed to move entry-level professionals to the journey level. Our hope is that this understanding can help those in the field to address turnover rates by enabling them to oer the appropriate train- ing and support at the right time while also training people to get to the next career stage. Our next step was to work with our research and evaluation experts to design our assess- ment in a way that would give us the most accurate responses to determine if the current level of access to content and training available to the retail food regulatory community was sucient to perform their jobs eectively. We had a series of collaborative meetings with the joint advisory group during the first 6 months of 2022 to design the assessment. Our goal was to develop an assessment that would allow us to evaluate responses according to respondents’ individual demographics, job levels, job func- tions, and years of experience in retail food safety. We also wanted, however, to be sure to understand jurisdiction-level issues like juris- diction size, location, and expected turnover rates. Ultimately, we decided to ask respon- dents to either answer questions for themselves based on their own unique history and needs (we called these individual-level questions) or to answer questions on behalf of their jurisdic- tion if they had a role in planning trainings for their agency (we called these jurisdiction-level questions). Every respondent answered ques-

FIGURE 1

Quadrant Analysis Framework

High

Quadrant 1 Low Knowledge Exposure

Quadrant 2 High Knowledge Exposure

High Relevance

Content Knowledge Exposure

High

Low

Quadrant 4 Low Knowledge Exposure

Quadrant 3 High Knowledge Exposure

Low Relevance

Low

Relevance to Job Duties

tions about their individual demographic char- acteristics and the relevance of key knowledge areas to retail food safety work. Individual-level respondents were then asked to assess their exposure to key knowledge areas. Jurisdiction- level respondents were asked to answer a series of questions about their jurisdiction but were not asked about exposure to knowledge areas since it would not be possible for them to know the level of exposure of their entire agency. For the needs assessment to give us the most accurate look at retail food regulatory train- ing, we needed to ensure the uniqueness of the retail food safety regulatory landscape was fully captured. Our objective was to ensure that the information we collected would be highly useful in the allocation of resources and addressing specific needs. NEHA has delivered training on behalf of FDA nationwide; how- ever, there is a lack of data confirming that training is reaching all individuals evenly. Our training needs assessment aimed to under- stand how participants rated the relevance of and exposure to the 59 NCS knowledge areas based on various factors such as job level, years of experience, and job function.

we needed to reach all corners of the coun- try, all sizes of jurisdictions, and all levels of regulatory involvement in retail food safety. As a leader in EPH, NEHA has completed numerous projects with federal funding from FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Health Resources and Ser- vices Administration, the National Science Foundation, and others. We also have strong working collaborations with other national associations such as the National Association of County and City Health Ocials (NAC- CHO), the Conference for Food Protection (CFP), and many other agencies and organi- zations. NEHA is also a founding member of the Retail Food Safety Regulatory Association Collaborative—an alliance among profes- sional associations and federal agencies—and we were able to use these combined networks to promote the survey. Our organization has over 7,000 national members in all 50 states and 4 U.S. territories. Through direct commu- nication with our members, facilitated by our nine regional vice-presidents and local ali- ates, we enjoy unapparelled trust and access to EPH professionals, including the most dif- ficult to reach governmental food safety pro- fessionals—those employed by tribes, territo- ries, and rural or frontier agencies. By leveraging our many strong connec- tions within the field of EPH and retail

Leveraging Strong Networks to Maximize Survey Responses

For the survey to be a valid national over- view of the retail food regulatory community,

Volume 86 • Number 6