Transportation Research Board - Transportation Workforce Call

Call For Abstracts

Deadline: September 30, 2024

The Transportation Research Board (TRB) invites you to submit a proposal to contribute to a working session at the National Summit on the Future of the Transportation Workforce, to be held June 2-4, 2025, in Westminster, Colorado. The Summit will have an interactive format to facilitate innovative thinking and problem solving. The conversation will focus on identifying research needs of practitioners to ensure a resilient and skilled workforce for our changing modes and communities.

The program will host several plenary panels but will mostly be built around working group breakout sessions with discussion being framed by short presentations. There will also be several poster sessions to ensure that a full range of innovative ideas, approaches and research are covered. TRB welcomes proposals for presentations and posters that encourage interactive, peer-to-peer engagement.

Topic Areas for Transportation Workforce Abstracts

The program will center around three key questions:

1. How Do We Attract and Engage a Diverse Workforce?

Presentations in this topic area might address:

Developing a community-serving and community-supported workforce
Creating economic opportunity in the community
Education and training, recruitment systems
Labor unions & employer partnerships
Addressing regional differences while building a national workforce development strategy
The “greying” trend in the U.S.
Underrepresentation of women and other minority populations

2. What Kind of Workforce Do We Need for the 21^st Century?

Presentations in this topic area might address:

Trust and teamwork/knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs)
Implications of change and innovation in technology and its applications (artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, The Internet of Things, 3-D printing, materials sciences, energy storage, and quantum computing) for the future workforce
Preparation at all levels in the educational continuum
Integration of learning and mastery of new skills and techniques into jobs
Building and rebuilding flexible teams over the lifespan of projects
Upskilling the current workforce

3. What Business Models and Tools Sustainably Support Workforce Needs?

Presentations in this topic area might address:

Measuring workforce initiatives and investments.
Showing meaningful results
Building out new and resilient approaches to a well skilled, adaptable workforce
Bringing real data to future conversations and deliberations

4. Other: We also welcome ideas that are outside of these questions but focus in on building the future workforce and are proposed in a presentation style that will share, but also engage participants to work on solutions.

How to Submit an Abstract

Practitioners and researchers focused on the future of the transportation workforce are welcome to share their experiences with the industry at this conference. All abstracts should be submitted by September 30, 2024; they should be no longer than 400 words; and should clearly convey the material that will be presented. Submitters will be asked to identify which of the conference questions best align with their presentation topic. Submitters will also be asked to indicate their preferred delivery format (poster, panel, short working group presentation); final designation of the format will be at the discretion of the conference planning committee.

Questions? Please contact:
Claire Randall