TDC is committed to providing significant and useful opportunities for professional development. Moreover, we believe that professional development needs to be part of our own working culture, not merely something to be outsourced. A key part of our operational work is to create opportunities for development, an example being our semi-annual Worksphere Institute Symposia. These two-day programs involve teaching and facilities staff of our Job Corps Centers in targeted exploration of relevant ideas and designs.

In a recent Symposium, for example, we investigated the design idea of "participatory community" in a Job Corps environment. In keeping with our conviction that to become successful in the work place, new workers need to have interpersonal work place skills and the ability to collaborate in work groups and teams, our Job Corps staff are focusing on innovative approaches to deepening the presence of participatory community on Center. In this Symposium, staff engaged in investigations of the idea, and use of contemporary technology tools to brainstorm, capture and report their ideas. Follow-on projects support the embedding of these ideas into the Job Corps Center environment.

A deliberate design element of our approach to professional development is that it should be (and in our projects, is) both relevant and collaborative. Given that our staff is charged with engaging our clients in producing their own learning in an authentic, enterprise-based learning environment, we believe that our staff deserves to be likewise involved in their own learning.