The Institute for the Advancement of Family Support Professionals
Learn more about The Institute here.
What is the Institute for the Advancement of Family Support Professionals (Institute)?
The Institute offers Family Support Professionals everywhere the opportunity to learn new skills and grow their careers. Through engaging, online modules and a personalized learning map feature, professionals take charge of their growth and advancement.
The Institute is being developed through a Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Innovation Award by building upon previous work of project partners to enhance professional development across the field.
Early Impact Virginia uses a competency-based approach to provide an individualized learning pathway for all home visiting professionals. We implement this approach through The Institute.
Virginia is a founding and lead partner on The Institute, a robust learning management system where all of Virginia’s live and self-paced courses are housed.
Home visitors and supervisors use the Institute to assess their knowledge, learn through self-paced online e-learning modules, register for live training events, and demonstrate continued learning through quizzes. Home visitors can even earn certificates, CEU’s, digital badges, college course credit, and ultimately National Family Support Professional Certification!
The Institute for the Advancement of Family Support Professionals (The Institute) is an online suite of professional development services that embraces the research behind best practices in adult learning and immersive technology. This collaborative and cross-model approach gives all home visitors easy access to quality, competency-based learning modules. The Institute is where you can find all of Virginia’s online and classroom (or ClassZOOM) training for home visitors and supervisors.
All of the professional development opportunities accessible through The Institute are grounded in The National Competency Framework, which reflects the work and input from more than 20 states, including Virginia.
Through The Institute, Early Impact Virginia played a leading role in the development and launch of the Rapid Response Virtual Home Visiting project in April 2020. As a result, much of the new content and evolving best practices to support Virtual Home Visiting are now being added to learning modules on The Institute.
Early Impact Virginia and the Virginia Department of Health worked with the Iowa Department of Public Health to develop The Institute in 2018. Since then, The Institute has grown rapidly, with more than 11,000 users from all 50 states accessing the platform.
Check out the Getting Started page to learn more about logging on and using The Institute.
Career Compass
The Career Compass is a software program that works as a personal navigation tool. It was designed around the National Family Support Professional Competency Framework and built into the Institute’s learning management system. This tool guides learners through online modules needed to demonstrate competency attainment through the National Family Support Professional Certification Exam.
View the 9 steps below to see how the Career Compass can support your learning.
Ready to Get Started?
Step 1: Create your account today at Institutefsp.org.
Step 2: Watch this short video to learn about the Institute’s Career Compass and how it will guide your learning.
Step 3. Take the Pre-assessment on the Institute to unlock your individualized learning pathway.
