HFES Member Education and Training Needs

Because education and training needs are likely to vary depend- ing on whether one is a student, academic, or practitioner, different sets of items were presented to these three occupational sub- groups. Therefore, only students should have responded to the student items, the academics to the academics items, and the prac- titioners to the practitioner items. Because it was possible for anyone to respond to any set of items, the data were sorted by occupation. Therefore, only those responses made by respondents who identified as students were used in the analysis of student needs. The same process of analysis was used for the academic and practitioner items.
Respondents indicated the extent to which an item was an edu- cation or training need by selecting either “not a need,” “a need,” or “an important need.” To compare the results with the 2003 data, we combined the “need” and “important need” categories to represent the “need” category. Based on the percentage of need, the items were rank ordered for each occupational subgroup.