Water testing
At this year's Good Lab Practices Conference, held on 10–11 August 2026 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the programme offered a useful snapshot of where water-testing laboratories are actually directing their training effort – even as PFAS analysis absorbs a growing share of budgets and management attention.
The 32nd annual event, hosted by the joint Laboratory Practices Committee of the Virginia Water Environment Association and Virginia AWWA, opened with a Monday workshop dedicated to core bacterial testing methods: enterococci, heterotrophic plate count and Legionella.
Tuesday's technical sessions, by contrast, leaned heavily toward PFAS analysis by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. That split reflects a genuine tension facing laboratory managers.
PFAS compounds have become the defining compliance driver of the decade for drinking water and wastewater utilities, prompting investment in specialised instrumentation, method validation and staff training that did not exist a few years ago.
Regulatory pressure, from federal maximum contaminant levels to a growing patchwork of state-level limits, has made PFAS capability close to a prerequisite for a modern water-testing laboratory.
Meeting that requirement typically means new LC-MS/MS capacity, extended method validation work, and staff retraining that competes directly for the same hours and budget lines that bacterial testing has traditionally drawn on.
But the conference programme suggests labs are not letting that pressure crowd out more established disciplines.
Bacterial contamination, and Legionella in particular, remains a live public health risk with real outbreak consequences when surveillance or testing lapses; it does not become less dangerous because a newer analyte class has taken the regulatory spotlight.
Heterotrophic plate count and enterococci testing also underpin routine process control and permit compliance work that utilities still rely on daily, independent of any PFAS programme, and both remain core parameters that laboratory accreditation bodies expect competent staff to demonstrate proficiency in as a condition of ISO 17025 accreditation.
Continuing education credit for the event was listed as pending at the time the programme was published, a minor administrative detail but a reminder that even long-running, well-organised conferences can lag on paperwork while substantive training content moves ahead of it.
The pattern is not unique to Virginia.
State primacy agencies and utilities across the US face a similar balancing act as national PFAS drinking water limits and monitoring rounds work through the system, alongside state rules that in some cases go further than federal requirements.
For contract laboratories serving multiple states, that means maintaining accreditation across a widening set of methods without the luxury of retiring older ones, since permit and primacy requirements for microbiological testing do not lapse simply because a new compliance driver has emerged.
There is also a workforce dimension that outlasts any single compliance cycle.
Analysts trained primarily on PFAS methods over the past several years may have had fewer opportunities to build deep bench experience in the microbiological techniques that remain a core part of state primacy inspections and permit renewals.
A conference agenda that keeps both disciplines active side by side, rather than letting one crowd the other off the calendar entirely, is one practical way laboratory managers can guard against that skills gap opening up further down the line.
The harder question for laboratory managers is one of capacity rather than choice. Staff time, instructor availability, proficiency testing budgets and instrument time are all finite, and the list of analytes a competent laboratory is expected to cover keeps expanding.
A conference programme built solidly around both PFAS and bacterial fundamentals suggests demand for both skill sets is real.
Whether training budgets and staffing levels are expanding to match that demand, rather than simply being reallocated from one discipline to another, is the question worth asking as PFAS compliance work continues to grow.
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