pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

This past Monday, February 22, Dr. Yinhai Wang, along with PacTrans associate director, Dr. Anne Moudon, and UW transportation faculty, Dr. Scott Rutherford, met with officials from Washington State Department of Transportation to discuss a new potential partnership. Years ago, the University of Washington’s previous UTC hosted a continuing education, workforce development, and training program for government agency employees. Unfortunately, due to a downturn in the economy, and a lack of reinvestment to keep the courses up-to-date, that program fell by the wayside.

The purpose of the meeting was to address WSDOT’s interest in rebuilding this continuing education, workforce development, and training program. Discussion began with a short review by Dr. Scott Rutherford of the history of the previous training program called TranSpeed: its benefits, its weaknesses, and lessons learned.

In discussions for moving forward, action items were broken into short term opportunities and long term opportunities. In the short term, those present discussed the opportunity of setting up some pilot trainings. Among other benefits, these pilots would offer some opportunity to test different delivery methods for trainings (ie. One-day workshops, one-hour online sessions, half-day webinars, etc.) These would also allow PacTrans to help WSDOT and others begin catching up on trainings for the most urgent topics while more long term structure is put in place.

In the long term, it was decided that PacTrans would utilize some of its student intern manpower to conduct a literature review of all of the different courses, workshops, and programs that already exist. This will be a comprehensive search of other UTCs, DOTs, universities, ITE, AASHTO, FHA, etc. Those in attendance agreed that there is no sense recreating the wheel but we first need to go find what’s out there before we know where we’re starting from.

Per meeting outcome, the goal is to identify an immediate cost effective short term pilot training program that can be offered and delivered by UW and PacTrans. The long term goal is to get a sense of how the pilot training program will evolve and work on developing a formal, sustainable long range program that will develop technical, professional, collaboration, and leadership skills.

PacTrans is excited to begin building a comprehensive platform to be able to offer all agencies from state DOTs to counties and cities, the opportunity for continuing education for their employees.