The Need

The Colorado Shines Professional Development Information System (PDIS) is a rich source of data on Colorado’s early childhood workforce, but it can be hard for stakeholders to navigate and understand this data.

Additionally, Colorado is facing a shortage of early childhood educators. Having high-quality data about the workforce will help CDEC and partners better respond to the needs of child care providers and enact successful strategies that will grow and support the workforce.

The Strategy

This stimulus project aims to update the previous data dashboard with more interactive and informative displays that can answer key questions about Colorado’s early childhood workforce.

CDEC is actively developing an updated version of an early care and education workforce data dashboard using data from the PDIS to support better understanding of workforce size, roles, geographic distribution, turnover and more.

Key Outcomes and Learnings

Impact

Workforce data dashboards for the first two phases of work are available now.

The existing workforce data dashboards, created by the LINC Network at the Colorado Evaluation Action Lab (CEAL), allow for insights into the state’s early childhood workforce in a way that hasn't been available before. The 2021 dashboard allows for data breakdowns by county, early childhood council, Local Coordinating Organization (LCO), job role and more. This new dashboard also shows recruitment and retention trends from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2020-2021 school year, highlighting the extreme drop in retention that the early childhood field saw as a result of the pandemic.

Learning

These dashboards provide great insight into the workforce, but there is much more that can be done to support the field. For example, having a greater amount of up-to-date data, and more data on why people change or leave roles would help CDEC better direct resources to improve retention. The PDIS is actively making updates to improve how easily early childhood professionals can access resources and the quality of data being collected.

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Funding

Amount: $200,000

Source: American Rescue Plan Discretionary

Expiration: September 30, 2024

Next Steps

CEAL will continue to support the development of the 2022 data dashboard. CDEC and CEAL are working closely with the Office of Information Technology (OIT) to scope out and build the platforms needed to host these dashboards within the state's systems with the infrastructure to automatically update the workforce data dashboard. Completion of this process is expected to take place in 2024.