Building Public Health System Capacity: Use of online job posters to study Canadian public health workforce education and competency requirements

Background and Objectives In 2014, the CPHA noted that 8 years after the Naylor report, there remains a lack of national data enumerating the Canadian public health workforce. They observed that without this data, the ability to perform any workforce planning is very limited. The lack of comprehensive workforce data on specific public health disciplines is also a challenge for academic programs and continuing professional education strategies and their ability to adapt their strategies to the workforce. Part of the challenge in generating national data was differences in data collected, methods employed an analysis of findings, making the information less useful for comparative purposes, consequently making it difficult to generate a comprehensive national picture. OBJECTIVES Our objective was to explore the utility of job posters and the idea was that this analysis would uncover very valuable information on the Canadian public health workforce as well as provide us with a better understanding of the education, skill, experience and competency requirements for professional public health practitioners in Canada. The analysis would not be very difficult to perform because job poster information is public and while job posters are generated in different formats, they are generally fairly consistent in terms of the requirements for education, skills and experience. Yielding very useful information will also help contribute to workforce planning as well as strategies to bridge academic public health education and public health employers. Our main goal at the end of this study was to produce some sort of national data where employers can use this baseline data and compare it to their own organization. In which we have done for Agency job posters and have performed some analysis on this.

BACKGROUND Furthermore, the report generated from the meeting of the Canadian Network of Schools and Programs of Population and Public Health highlights all the more reason to conduct this study as it also touches upon the “informal” public health workforce, and the importance of identifying this group, its role and how to better support; especially in continuing professional education. In our presentation this is a limitation as we are unable to identify the informal public health workforce. If such an identification was possible, then our method would be a superior one to gather information on education and skills sets of the informal public health workforce. It is evident that we require better information regarding the workforce in order to… Better align training with work requirements To plan i.e. substantial portion of the workforce will be retiring and this poses as both an opportunity and challenge – however this still limits the “supply and demand” approach due to the extent of uncontrollable variables. Need to consider numbers, competencies and distribution

Community/Public Health Nurses Educators/Health Promotion Workers Methodology Academics Community/Public Health Nurses Educators/Health Promotion Workers Epidemiologists/Biostatisticians/Data Analysts Laboratory Technologists Occupational Health Workers Public Health Administrators/Managers/Directors Public Health Dentists Public Health Dieticians/Nutritionists Public Health Inspectors/Environmental Health Officers Public Health Physicians Public Health Policy Analysts Researchers Other METHODOLOGY A 16 month scan (between April 2014 and August 2015) of online public health job posters from Canadian employer websites was conducted. 394 advertised positions were identified and catalogued by a range of criteria, including education (degree requirements), skill and experience requirements. The positions were categorized by the 14 public health position categories (see presentation) and also by provincial, territorial and federal employer. These categories were established in the context of public health and were used to help set the foundation for identifying the appropriate positions for the study. The skill requirements were also indexed against the Core Competencies for Public Health 1.0 and compared for different public health profession designations. --- The categories were limited and boiled down to 14 – taken from the CPHA Future study – where graduates go – i.e. Include informal positions – all THIS study can say is to traditional jobs, as by CPHA criteria - limitations:

Results RESULTS Public health job posters (n=394) were obtained from Canadian employer websites between the dates of April 2014 and August 2015. Our data set included positions from all 14 public health position categories and from all FPT jurisdictions. Approximately 25% of advertised positions were community/public health nurses, 15% were public health administrators/managers/directors, and 12% were epidemiologists/biostatisticians/data analysts. 32% of the postings require a Bachelor’s degree and 77% required a Master’s or a PhD degree (some requested multiple degrees). An even spectrum of core competencies is observed for all job posters, with the highest rate for public health sciences (97%) and communication (91%).

Entry VS. Advanced Level Positions Education Requirements Observations Entry VS. Advanced Level Positions Education Requirements Skill Requirements Master’s related to public health but not necessarily an MPH (Master of Public Health Degree) OBSERVATIONS There was adequate online data to capture national information on the Canadian workforce. We are able to make some key observations about entry vs. advanced level positions, education and skill requirements by job title. We made a key observation on the Master’s degree requirement for advanced level public health positions. Such that, most employers that advertised for these advanced level positions were mostly looking for a Master’s RELATED to public health and not necessarily an MPH (Master of Public Health degree).

Variances in human resource practices across the country Limitations Variances in human resource practices across the country Job advertisements are not direct representation of national data Unable to enumerate total workforce numbers Study not able to capture all jobs that contribute to the public’s health i.e. “non-traditional jobs” – urban planners LIMITATIONS i) The quality of the data overall does have some limitations as there are undoubtedly variances in human resource practices across the country. (the practice of job advertising varies by province, such that some provinces will use a standard job poster for multiple job positions, whereas others will use a variation of job advertisements i.e. different posters for the public and different ones for internal individuals.) ii) Direct comparison of specific employer job advertisements to the national data set is also not ideal, as the positions advertised by employer may include non-public offered positions (observations made in this study – though very useful information cannot be used to make final conclusions that are out of scope). iii) The use of job posters cannot be used to enumerate total workforce numbers , and may also not be ideal to study non-traditional public health jobs, which may contribute to the public’s health but are not categorized as formal public health positions in our data (i.e. urban planners).

Sharing Publication Concluding Thoughts CONCLUSIONS Unfortunately, the national enumeration of public health workforce data will not be in the near future. Therefore, the use of public health job postings is a useful surrogate for many desire criteria (skills, education, experience…) and may also be useful in the analysis by an employer wishing to compare their specific workforce to national data (to better plan continuing professional development, validate core competency skills sets…). It is also very useful for academic programs and their efforts to match curriculum to practice. We will be doing a full analysis of our data and publishing the results in the near future. Furthermore, the data available from job posters is a useful surrogate for national information about the education and skills needed for public health practice in Canada. In addition to the data that we collected for external postings, we were also able to catalog a subset of position advertisements for the Public Health Agency of Canada (internal postings), using similar criteria as the external postings. We hope that in the future, we are able to use both data sets for analyses. Sharing Publication