EXF 2023 Professional Development Needs Assessment Report

area respondents for the 1862 institutions is also of interest. Community development, as a program area, also appears to be well represented across the institutions.

Respondent Years of Service and Career Stages

Years of Service For this report responses of 0 years or non-respondents to the question were removed. A summary of the years of service reported by Land-grant type is provided in Table 5. Immediate observations include the much lower mean and maximum years of service accompanied by a lower standard deviation for the 1994 Land-grants. Another observation is the large difference between the mean and maximum years of service.

Table 5 Years of service by institution type, excluding question non-respondents and responses of "0".

Land-Grant Types

Parameter

All

1862

1890

1994

Range (Years)

0.4 - 53

0.4-53

1-50

0.5-29

Number of Question Responses

1020

917

72

24

Average

13

13.1

13.46

2.11

SD

10.5

10.5

10.68

9.15

To look at this in a different way, data was categorized for respondents with three or fewer years, four to seven years, eight to fifteen years, sixteen to thirty years, and greater than thirty years of service as reflected in Table 6. Again, the lower length of service in the 1994 Land-grants is evident as there were no respondents with more than 30 years of service in contrast to 7.52% in 1862 and 6.94% in 1890 Land-grants. Also, of interest is that nearly half (45.83%) of the 1994 respondents had three or fewer years of service, compared to 20.83% for 1862 and 19.44% for 1890 Land-grants. If the sample of 1994 respondents in this survey is representative of the 1994 Land-grant institutions, this would most likely impact demand for onboarding, mentoring, and other professional development associated with preparing employees to be successful in their careers. Couple this with the earlier data that indicates that many of these individuals are in administrative positions, suggesting need for leadership and mentoring training coupled with professional development traditionally presented in early career stages.

Table 6 Break down of percent respondents in years of service categories compared across institutional types.

Land-Grant Types

Category

All

1862

1890

1994

< = 3 Years

21.18%

20.83%

19.44%

45.83%

4-7 Years

18.73%

18.76%

15.28%

20.83%

8-15 Years

25.49%

25.74%

27.78%

12.50%

16-30 Years

27.25%

27.15%

30.56%

20.83%

>30 Years

7.35%

7.52%

6.94%

0.00%

Career Stages Extension career stage work was first proposed by (Rennekamp & Nall, 1994) as a way to consider the professional development needs of individuals at various stages of their careers. These included the early or entry level career stage, the colleague career stage, the counselor career stage, and the advisor career stage. These have been amended in recent years, adding a pre-entry stage for developing coursework and internships for individuals preparing for a career in Extension (Benge, Harder, & Carter, 2011). Additional work continues related to career stage which may be more effective in identifying organizational professional development

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