The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Committee on Human Resources is hosting a free workforce development webinar on March 25 from 1 to 2 p.m. eastern standard time. To register for this webinar, click here.
[Above photo by the Arkansas Department of Transportation.]
The webinar’s speaker – Amanda Holland, management director at the Alaska Office of Management and Budget – will explain how state DOTs can benefit from integrating “knowledge management” or KM into their workforce development strategies
Established as a business discipline in 1991, KM refers to the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing information via a “multidisciplinary approach” within an organization.
This webinar will show how state DOTs can enhance their workforce development efforts by using KM to both mitigate threats to institutional knowledge while leveraging it to better address training, onboarding, and overall workforce planning skills.
Workforce development is also one of three key “emphasis areas” espoused by Carlos Braceras, executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation and AASHTO’s 2018-2019 president.
“At the end of the day, everything we do is about people,” he noted during an AASHTO staff briefing last year following testimony on Capitol Hill. “As state DOTs we serve people, but in order to do our job, we need people with the right skills and the right tools. That is why I am convinced that we need to spend more and more time than we ever have before to find not only the right people but to give them opportunities for learning and growing.”
“We need to recognize we are living in an era where change is not only happening but happening faster than ever before – and it will only happen even faster in the future,” Braceras added. “If we don’t keep our eye on people and growing people, we won’t be the state DOTs we need to be.”