Tips for Choosing and Evaluating Continuing Education Courses
Continuing Education programs focus on helping professionals extend their formal education. While not every field requires CE, a few that find it useful are lawyers, healthcare workers, educators, accountants, and engineers.
The goal of CE is to ensure that professionals remain up-to-date with education relevant to their field, along with maintaining licenses and qualifications. CE allows professionals to move forward and refresh crucial skills that keep their clients, customers, and patients safe and satisfied.
Choosing and Evaluating Courses
The goal is to get the most out of CE courses. Here are a few tips to make that happen:
1. Have a Vision in Mind
CE courses offer the opportunity to refresh outdated training and open up the mind to new ideas. For this reason, try to avoid focusing solely on cost. Instead of thinking about money, consider the investment you’re making into your future. Seek courses that address your known areas of weakness so you can improve in a manner that counts.
2. Make Note of Learning Objectives
While learning objectives can’t explain the minutiae of the everyday, they’ll give you an accurate, overarching idea of what to expect. The learning objectives communicate the level of the course you’re considering, which allows you to discern whether it’s right for you – AKA material you aren’t already well-versed in.
3. Branch Out
The last thing you want to do in a CE course is stay inside your comfort zone. If you’ve been in your field for a long time, change your focus and look at it from a beginner’s point of view. Instead of reinforcing the knowledge you already have, seek territory that you’ve not yet explored. That curiosity will make you a better thinker.
4. Seek Challenges
No one has advanced far by doing the same thing over and over. Searching for courses that challenge your professional knowledge makes your brain work harder. If it turns out that the tried-and-true methods you’re used to still hold water, that’s a boost of confidence. On the other hand, if new methods poke holes in your schools of thought, that presents an opportunity for growth and engagement.
The GCEA Effect
As a CE professional and member of the GCEA, you are automatically likely to meet all of the expectations that make CE great. You are equipped with the revolutionary, outside-the-box thinking that CE so direly needs.
GCEA provides value and authority that can’t be found anywhere else. Take the first step in molding the future of professionals by becoming a member today.