Southern California Regional Transit Training Consortium: Skills Gap & Needs Assessment

The transit sector grows and evolves quickly with the needs of growing, busy cities. With this growth comes a need for more transit workers and more training to ensure workers can best serve their diverse communities. This report contains a transit training needs assessment and gap analysis to identify the most pressing challenges of the evolving transit workforce served by the Southern California Regional Transit Training Consortium (SCRTTC). Most importantly, this report documents and determines SCRTTC priorities to ensure the incumbent and future transit workforce is equipped with the professional and technological skills required to address the transformational trends affecting the transit sector. The report primarily utilized qualitative methods with the use of a series of interviews, a focus group, a workshop, and an online survey. Above all, this assessment discovered that existing SCRTTC training curriculum is respected, and there is strong demand for additional topics. Transit maintenance professionals consistently endorsed the value and quality of SCRTTC training—they just want more of it. They want it to be developed more efficiently and at a higher volume. They seek more localized and customized delivery methods for training and curriculum. All of those findings compel a question: How can SCRTTC make organizational changes to more rapidly develop curriculum and provide targeted training programs for technicians? This report recommends SCRTTC integrate a suite of digital products into the SCRTTC website to respond to the needs documented in this assessment—namely higher capacity for more training offerings and more online delivery methods while simultaneously enhancing member demands for more customized and location-based training. Implementing the digital platform recommended in this report would empower SCRTTC leadership to foster increased interactivity between transit agencies, training partners, and SCRTTC management. These digital tools would enable SCRTTC to expand its coverage to all of California. This statewide approach to transit training could be used to implement similar consortia in states throughout the U.S