Getting a Return on Your Investment in Professional Development: Putting Practices in Place that Yield Results | McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership

Note: This resource is part of a self-reflection series focused on professional development. Read the rest of the series here.

In the resource shared in the previous Points to Ponder, “Professional Growth: Do You See What I See,” you reflected on the value you place on professional growth within your program. Valuing professional growth is a critical first step, but administrators must also foster norms of continuous learning by putting practices in place to support this value. To demonstrate one way to do this, I would like to focus on a challenge often raised by administrators in early care and education.

Administrators frequently tell me that they spend a lot of money on professional development experiences for staff, yet they don’t feel like they get a big return on that investment. Staff often come back from workshops excited, but that excitement seems to fade quickly and implementing what they learned is a rare occurrence. After hearing this repeatedly, I began to ask several questions.

First, I would ask administrators about their own follow through after attending professional development. Did they return from their own professional development experiences and implement ideas they learned about? If not, why not? If so, how long did these new practices last and what strategies helped them to accomplish this? In many cases, responses to these questions were eye-opening. Administrators were candid and admitted they, too, didn’t always follow through with what they had learned. Sometimes they would tell me that time was a barrier, other times the barrier was related to a feeling of lack of support or buy-in from other staff or families, other times administrators just felt overwhelmed by all that needed to be changed and their enthusiasm for the new idea faded as they began to think about the logistics of implementation. These conversations helped to create a shared understanding about the obstacles that prevent people from putting great ideas into action. In some cases the conversations involved generating strategies for supporting themselves and their teachers.

Next, I would ask administrators what practices they had in place to support staff before leaving for a professional development opportunity and after they returned. Overwhelmingly this question was met with a look of bewilderment. Therein lies the problem. There is often a disconnect between participation and application. One solution to this challenge is to consider the practices that are in place to support staff who attend professional development such as trainings and workshops. For example, if administrators want staff to not only attend professional development opportunities, but implement what they learned and grow professionally from the experience, the center’s norms, routines, messaging, and policies, along with their leadership style need to support this. More specifically, if staff return from a professional development experience and they are never asked to reflect on its meaning to them or how to incorporate the new learning into their practice, there is little chance that new knowledge will be applied, let alone thought about again.

For some concrete examples of how to embed professional development into both administrative and pedagogical leadership practices click on the following link to the resource Putting Professional Development Into Practice.

Points to Ponder

In what ways are professional development opportunities supported in your program’s practices and by you as an administrator?

What prevents you from supporting professional development opportunities and what can you change in your program to make it more likely for staff to put into practice what they’ve learned from attending a training or workshop?

If you would like more ideas, check out Inspiring Peak Performance: Competence, Commitment, and Collaboration, which is a great resource for embedding professional growth throughout your organization.

Want to learn about early childhood leadership topics in person? Let us bring the learning to you. Contact us about traveling training options.

Jill Bella, Ed.D., is Director of Professional Learning for the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership and Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at National Louis University (NLU). In these roles, she oversees professional learning, conducts research, and consults for local and state initiatives on the Early Childhood Work Environment Survey (ECWES), the Program Administration Scale (PAS), the Business Administration Scale for Family Child Care (BAS) and leadership topics in early care and education. Dr. Bella is also the co-author of several books and trainer’s guides including A Great Place to Work and Inspiring Peak Performance.

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Examining the Role of Employer Benefits and Turnover in Center-based Child Care

By Robyn Kelton, M.A. • June 27, 2025

INTRODUCTION Turnover rates in child care are among the highest in education, with over 160,000 workforce openings predicted annually (Bassok et al., 2014; Doromal et al., 2022; Joughin, 2021; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). While some turnover is expected and even necessary, the levels of turnover experienced in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC) are not only alarmingly high but deeply problematic. In 2021, a national survey conducted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children found that over 80% of child care centers were experiencing a staffing shortage, with the majority of those programs reporting one-to-five open roles, but 15% reporting between six and 15 open roles (NAEYC, 2021). Staffing shortages result in lost revenue, financial uncertainty, and program instability, often forcing administrators to operate below capacity and/or under reduced hours (NAEYC, 2021; NAEYC, 2024; Zero to Three, 2024). Limited enrollment slots and classroom and program closures lead to increased waiting lists (Zero to Three, 2024; Carrazana, 2023). In turn, families are placed in a highly vulnerable position of needing to leave the workforce to stay home with their child or turn to potentially unsafe or unregulated child care. Moreover, increased turnover in classrooms interrupts continuity of care and disrupts the relationships built between children and their educators (Reidt-Parker, J., & Chainski, M. J. (2015). Research has begun to highlight some of the programmatic and personnel characteristics predictive of increased staff turnover in ECEC programs. Low wages are most commonly identified as a strong predictor of turnover (Amadon et al., 2023; Bryant et al., 2023; Fee, 2024; Guevara, 2022; Totenhagen et al., 2016). However, workforce advocates and some researchers have begun to expand conversations on compensation to explore the impact the profession’s general lack of benefits such as paid time off, access to health insurance, and retirement benefits has on retention (e.g., Amadon et al., 2023; Bryant et al., 2023; Fee, 2024; Lucas, 2023). While informative, this body of work has typically approached benefits as binary variables (i.e., have or do not have) rather than reflect the spectrum on which benefits are commonly offered (e.g., the number of days off, the percent of insurance covered by the employer, and levels of retirement matching funds). This Research Note aims to expand on previous work investigating the relationship between benefits and turnover by exploring the possibility of a more nuanced relationship between the variables to determine if the level of benefits offered impacts turnover rates. METHOD This study used data collected via formal Program Administration Scale, 3rd Edition (PAS-3) assessments conducted by Certified PAS-3 Assessors between 2023 and 2025. To become certified, PAS-3 assessors must first achieve reliability (a score of at least 86%) on a test conducted after four days of training on the tool. Next, they must conduct two PAS assessments within three months of reliability training. PAS-3 national anchors reviewed the completed assessments for consistency, accuracy, and completeness. The study analyzed data from 133 PAS-3 assessments collected during the certification process across 12 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Mariana Islands. Measures Data for this study were collected using the PAS-3, a valid and reliable tool used to measure and improve Whole Leadership practices in center-based programs (Talan, Bella, Jorde Bloom, 2022). The PAS-3 includes 25 items, each composed of 2-5 indicator strands and scored on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = inadequate, 3 = minimal, 5 = good, and 7 = excellent). Item scores are averaged to determine a mean PAS-3 score. Of particular interest to this study is Item 5: Benefits. Item 5 measures employee access to health insurance and considers what percentage of the cost is paid by the employer, the total number of paid time off days within the first and fifth years of employment, access to a retirement plan, and the percentage at which the employer will match the employee’s contribution. Last, Item 5 explores provisions made to cover the costs of staff’s professional development. Non-applicable is allowed as a response for indicators related to health insurance and retirement if there are no full-time staff employed by the program. Sample Program enrollment ranged in size from four children to 285, with a mean enrollment of 65 and a median of 55. Total program staff for the sample ranged from two to 44 staff, with an average of just under 14 staff (13.93) and a standard deviation of 8.80. Table 1 below provides a detailed breakdown of staff by role and full-time and part-time status.