How many hours per week does your team spend managing professional development (PD) for your district? Do you have to work magic to wrangle evidence of teachers’ completed continuing education units (CEUs)? Do you know how many teachers’ licenses are up for renewal this year, as well as in the next three years? Is it a major headache for you to share qualifying PD activities for teachers throughout the year? Can you easily track which team members are on track to fulfill renewal requirements?
If any of these questions made your heart rate spike, you are not alone. Far too many district leaders like you spend hours operating a manual, error-prone professional development management (PDM) system, even with technology in the mix.
But you can’t afford this inefficient process any longer. Keep reading to discover four reasons why now is the time to find a truly modern PDM solution.
1. Teacher retention and engagement remain low.
Despite the increase in EdWeek’s Teacher Morale Index reported during the 2024-2025 school year, districts are still struggling to engage and retain their teaching staff. Teacher absenteeism has risen significantly since the pandemic, and last year, every single state still faced staff shortages in at least one teaching area.
The need for supportive and engaging work environments for teachers has reached a hypercritical point.
In times like these, you must seize any opportunity to reduce friction for your staff and for teachers, especially with essential processes like renewing licenses and completing CEUs. With a modern PDM solution, district team members easily create and track all manner of PD activities for teachers. In kind, teachers use a PDM solution to enroll in these opportunities and submit evidence of their participation to HR and other district departments — ideally in just a few clicks.
While a PDM solution isn’t a silver bullet for all staffing challenges, it eases frustration, and every win like this can make a meaningful difference in teacher satisfaction.
2. Budgets are tighter than ever.
With massive changes introduced to the federal education budget, districts across all states face tough questions about how to use their ever-limited funds for the 2025-2026 school year. A typical district spends between seventy and eighty percent of its budget on personnel salaries and benefits, whether it is urban or rural, small or large.
An effective PDM solution must support your district’s already large investment in staff, especially when compliance issues and teacher turnover could increase these costs. By saving your staff time, you literally save money, allowing administrators to focus their efforts on other initiatives and teachers themselves.
But, as with any new solution you purchase, be sure to evaluate the vendor building it, too. After all, it is already expensive to launch a new solution. You shouldn’t have to navigate a vendor who ghosts your requests for new functionality, up-charges you for additional training, or requires a rigid, long-term contract to partner.
At Red Rover, we pride ourselves on providing stellar support and truly collaborative customer engagement, from addressing client questions within minutes to launching new features requested with customer input. But don’t take our word for it — discover what fellow educators have to say about their experiences with Red Rover.
3. Many “PDM” solutions don’t manage PD.
Even with a great vendor partner, you also need to make sure you have a true PDM solution. Most tools that claim to address PDM challenges fail to provide frictionless, compliance-oriented, and retention-focused systems. In fact, they aren’t PDM solutions at all!
Why? They overemphasize PD delivery over management. Operating more like an LMS, these platforms are built primarily to deliver online coursework and content to staff. While these learning tools can be useful for teacher development, they don’t organize the intricate details of the entire PD ecosystem wrapped around this content.
Look for a truly modern PDM solution that:
- Unifies licensure tracking.
- Automates PD attendance and credits awarding.
- Offers an easy teacher experience to fulfill their PD requirements.
- Provides clear, robust reporting on credentialing and licensure renewals, CEUs per staff, and more.
4. PD processes are cumbersome, siloed, and error-prone.
Do your systems for PD, curriculum, and HR come together in smooth harmony or total chaos? More often than not, these processes are isolated to each department, despite their intersections. Not only does this arrangement create more overhead for staff — who must manage the information flowing between these gaps — but it also increases the risk of errors and non-compliance.
Here’s an example: A teacher signs up for a professional learning opportunity during the school week, which means a substitute needs to cover his classroom for that day. A clunky PDM system might require him to submit a separate request for his absence in the absence management tool.
Though simple on the surface, there’s plenty of room for human error in these siloed processes. The teacher might forget to request the day off, request the wrong date off, or fail to specify that this absence request is related to PD requirements. A school administrator might have to work quickly to fill a last-minute absence request or, without sufficient context, may deny the request altogether. These gaps create frustration for principals trying to maintain learning continuity and teachers trying to complete their required CEUs.
On the other hand, thanks to interoperability (how clean data moves between systems, like hiring, payroll, etc.), a modern PDM solution resolves these issues. Red Rover’s PDM solution, for instance, immediately flags a new absence in the absence management system, along with context for this request. School leadership receives this notification right away, leaving them with plenty of time to fill this upcoming vacancy and support this teacher with fulfilling their PD requirements — all in a matter of minutes.
By freeing staff from these necessary administrative tasks, a modern PDM solution allows your teams to focus on what really matters: your educators. And isn’t that why we invest in technology in the first place?
That’s precisely why Red Rover is launching its new Professional Development Management solution — purpose-built for educators with unparalleled customer service, uncompromising quality, and modern functionality to meet today’s human capital management needs. Request a demo to learn more.
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