By Brenda Bridges Cruz
Deputy Director, Office of Professional Development
August 3, 2022 – As we continue to build a first-rate training program, we keep in mind the important lesson that problems are meant to be overcome and there’s always an opportunity to refine and improve our trainings. During the pandemic, CDT’s Office of Professional Development was forced to cancel in-progress and scheduled on-site training and quickly find an alternative. We felt pressure to deliver mandated training to a state that was, for the most part, isolated. But pressure creates diamonds and following the shift to online training we saw our diamond as a significant increase in the number of local city and county employees participating in our virtual academies and other offerings. In fact, this segment of our training population soared 433% while on-demand online training subscriptions jumped 25%. Necessity drove us to overcome problems and reimagine how we function as a team, an office, and a department. It motivated us to provide our offerings virtually, which created greater access and equity for public employees across California. It’s a lesson I hope we can all adopt.
We’ve been working on some exciting training and education initiatives.
- Coordinated the effort for a local school district to partner their students with CDT as part of their summer internship program.
- Established the Workforce Development Advisory Council to inform the Information Technology Executive Committee about developments in our workforce efforts to advance state efforts for training and professional development.
- Planning the 2022 California Cybersecurity Education Summit. More than 1,200 people registered for last year’s all virtual event. This year’s on-site summit will be held October 20. Keep an eye out for more details.
As we continue to improve our training courses, we are pleased to announce our Salesforce Administrator Certification course this month. We’ll add security testing, test management, and mobile application certification testing later this year.
CDT has been busy developing the best courses to build a solid technology workforce pipeline and elevate careers. We look forward to seeing you soon.