Defining & Deploying Mission-Critical Talent: CPCA's NEW Strategic Workforce Planning Program
Competitive labor market. Skill gaps and shortages. Challenging recruitment and turnover. An aging workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic is causing rapid and long-lasting changes to workforce planning. The way in which community health centers (CHCs) train, recruit, and retain their staff is changing in this evolving environment. The lessons learned from reorganizing teams and reimagining systems is creating a new mindset for developing a diverse healthcare workforce. Developing a strategic workforce plan and maintaining it over time as an organization evolves provides a clear and actionable framework for addressing staffing challenges in ways that keep the organization on track toward achieving its strategic objectives.
The California Primary Care Association (CPCA), with the support of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), developed a NEW certificate program as part of a national initiative to increase and enhance the development of strategic workforce plans in CHCs. CPCA’s new Strategic Workforce Planning certification program is based on Human Capital Institute’s (HCI’s) industry-recognized Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) certification program and tailored to the unique needs of CHCs. It provides an opportunity for participants to obtain a professional development opportunity, in-depth knowledge on strategic workforce planning, a certificate, and professional credits (if eligible).
The inaugural cohort of 41 participants from CHCs and regional clinic associations commenced their learning journey in November 2021 with the SWP course. Over the next six months, they will draft their organization’s strategic workforce plan through the SWP workshop and office hours and refine it based on in-depth discussions in the learning accelerators. By the end of the course, they will have the opportunity to implement eight key steps in the SWP framework. CPCA will launch another cohort in 2022, so stay tuned for information on the upcoming application cycle! If you are interested in learning more, check out CPCA’s Strategic Workforce Planning webpage and/or email training@cpca.org.
Program Learning Objectives
Understand and articulate your health center’s business strategy and connect your strategic workforce planning processes to it to accelerate business outcomes.
Segment your Health Center’s roles to determine how each position contributes value and which roles are a priority versus those in the periphery.
Conduct an environmental scan of your health center to continuously identify and monitor trends that affect the workforce and the organization.
Analyze the current state of your health center to evaluate, benchmark, and inventory today’s workforce.
Construct a detailed future state for your health center through scenario planning of how the organization, environment, technologies, and operational norms will look in the coming years.
Identify gaps between the current and desired future workforce and organizational state.
Create an action plan for your health center to address, design, and/or restructure elements of the organization’s structure and talent initiatives.
Monitor and report with quantitative and qualitative benchmarks and milestones that are identified in the action plan. Report findings to stakeholders and management.