Impact of Professional Development Workshops on PA Faculty Retention and Career Advancement

• In Event: Comings and Goings: Entering, Staying, and/or Leaving PA Education

Abstract

Introduction: PA programs have seen unprecedented growth in the past 10 years with over 300 accredited PA programs currently (ARC-PA, 2022). With this growth comes the need for qualified faculty to support these programs. This retrospective quantitative data analysis asked the questions: What is the relationship between PA faculty participation in developmental workshops and (1) retention in PA education and/or (2) career advancement within PA education post workshop attendance?
Methods: The study population was all PA faculty attendees of a national association’s faculty development workshops using existing data from the workshop rosters and attendee profiles from 2017 to 2021 (n=1,600). The 2019 workshop participants (n=274) were selected as a subset of the workshop attendees to compare to PA faculty employed in PA education in 2019 (n= 2,857) but did not participate in any association workshops. Post-deduplication, there were 1,320 individuals who attended at least one of the workshops and met the inclusion requirement of being PA faculty.
Results: There were 301 participants who were no longer in PA education and 1,019 still employed in PA education (77.2%). Of the 2,857-control group, 1,117 were no longer in PA education and 1,740 were still employed in PA education (60.9%). A Chi-square test (106.17, df = 1, p-value < .01) showed a significant relationship between attending a workshop and remaining in PA education. An odds ratio of 2.2 indicated that individuals who attended a workshop were more than twice as likely currently to be in PA education than those who did not.
Logistic regression analysis was used to identify whether the independent variable of attending a workshop had any influence on retention in PA education and/or career advancement. For the PA faculty who attended a workshop, the number of workshops attended was not found to be a significant predictor of attaining a promotion in the timeframe observed. For workshop attendees, the number of workshops attended was found to be a significant predictor of staying in PA education (p-value ˂ .05).
Interrater reliability was determined by having two volunteer raters, in addition to the researcher, review a sample of 100 records and code the data for PA education employment, leadership positions, and promotions. Interrater reliability was estimated using Fleiss’ kappa coefficient (Fleiss, 1971) across the three raters with estimates found to be 0.69, 0.64, and 0.59, respectively – which concluded that other raters reviewing the dataset used in this study would draw similar conclusions regarding the position status. Additionally, the researcher reviewed discrepancies between their ratings and those of the volunteer ratings to assess potential widespread biases in decision-making. No such bias was identified. It was assumed that the differences in ratings were largely due to ambiguity in, and varying degrees of familiarity with, titles in PA education.
Discussion: This study provided information about the value of its professional development programming in helping to retain PA faculty in education. Future research can expand upon the importance of faculty development programming on faculty retention and advancement.

Author

• Karen Hills, PA Education Association