It was initially developed to replace the 30-year-old Field Training Officer (FTO) program, which research surveys indicated had become incompatible with community based policing and problem solving.
Through the Police Society for Problem Based Learning (www.pspbl.org) the model has been developed and employed in hundreds of departments in the U.S. and Canada.
As of 2017 more than 200 police agencies have now successfully adopted the PTO program using problem based learning as the basis of recruit training, and Washington, California and Kentucky, South Dakota and most Canadian Provinces have begun adopting it across those regions A version of the PTO Program was reworked in 2003 by practitioners from Reno and organizations across the United States to better reflect the use of the model by some organizations.
A 2nd generation of the PTO was sponsored and written by the Police Society for Problem Based Learning and authored by the original writers, Cleveland and Saville in 2015.
(http://www.pspbl.org/) The authors introduced it at the annual meeting of pspbl.org and many agencies have upgraded their model from the original versions.