The Board's training program focuses on increasing honesty and integrity in City government. Sessions provide critical information about City and State ethics laws, sensitize City officers and employees to real-world situations where the ethics rules commonly arise, and encourage participants to reach out to the Board for further resources and advice. General ethics trainings and topic-specific information sessions cover topics such as Conflicts of Interest, Political Activity, Gifts, Campaign Finance, Lobbying, and Financial Disclosure.

FY2025 was a significant year for the Board's training program as January 2025 marked the beginning of the rollout of Board Regulation No. 7's new ethics training requirement. Select, high-level City workers continue to need annual ethics refreshers, but all other City workers must now also attend refreshers once every five years until their City service has concluded. The Regulation outlines a five-year timeline to get all existing City workers in compliance with this new training requirement. For 2025, all workers who started with the City in years ending in “0” or “5” must attend a one-hour general ethics training session.

In preparation for the 2025 Regulation No. 7 rollout, Board Staff proactively reached out to City departments with large amounts of employees in need of refresher training. They also regularly attended HR managers meetings to spread the word on the new rule and to remind everyone how to sign up for or request ethics trainings. Lastly, they executed a postering campaign across the three main City buildings downtown.

In addition to ramping up outreach efforts, Board Staff launched a new training compliance and registration system in early June of 2025. Built in collaboration with the City’s Digital Workflow Transformation team, this new tool not only streamlines the registration process for users, but also can generate detailed reports. Board Staff are already using the system to assess how best to achieve maximum compliance with Regulation No. 7’s training mandate. 

Additional highlights from FY2025 include:

• Conducting first time on-site trainings for the Department of Prisons and the Philadelphia Water Department.

• Enhanced training and outreach collaboration with other City departments including the Office of the Chief Integrity Officer, the Office of Inspector General, and the Office of Talent and Employee Success.

• Revamping the Board's ethics manuals for a variety of City officers, employees, and board and commission members to reflect recent changes to Board Regulations.

Following these increased outreach efforts by Board Staff, training attendance increased by almost 20% compared to FY2024. The number of in-person training sessions also increased by 13% in FY2025. 

In sum, 3100 people attended 93 trainings in FY2025. 32 of those trainings were in-person and 61 were virtual. See the charts below for further detail on the Board's training program.