UPDATE: Friday, October 3rd, 2014
The 2014 National Rural ITS Conference (NRITS) was held in Branson, Missouri, August 24th-27th. Billed as ITS In The Heartland, this year’s conference provided participants with opportunities to network across many ITS disciplines while discussing a wide variety of ITS topics. Technical sessions, training opportunities, and professional tours brought together both traditional and non-traditional ITS users “to address such issues as rural safety, multi-agency coordination, and workforce development, as well as EMS and transit issues.”
Session G1 Professional Development Opportunities – Developing Your Skills and those of your Organization was an opportunity to learn about various professional development opportunities available through the USDOT’s Professional Capacity Building (PCB) Program and the online Knowledge Resources, along with PCB specifically for communications.
In this session, Doug Galarus presented Professional Capacity Building for Communications. To address the need for increased professional capacity for Rural ITS communications, the PCB project developed a comprehensive curriculum and conducted training for Rural ITS communications. The presentation discussed the curriculum that was developed and the training courses that have been delivered. Doug examined the lessons learned through two phases of the project and discussed options for continued professional capacity building of ITS engineers. He also provided insight on how this approach to PCB could be applicable to other state DOTs and outlined some opportunities for future research.
You can review the complete presentation here. Check out the PCB Impact page to see how the project has influenced positive change for Rural ITS engineers in California.
You can read more about WSRTC members at NRITS in the Consortium update from October 3rd, 2014. NRITS presentations can be found in the Proceedings at www.nationalruralitsconference.org/past-events/.