Continuing Education

Purpose

Continuing education serves to contribute to the sustained knowledge and skill acquisition of counselors beyond their terminal degree, licensure, or certification. Continuing education is referred to as both mandatory continuing education and as lifelong learning. These two perspectives on counselor knowledge and skill acquisition can certainly be related, but they represent different concepts. Mandatory continuing education is a required professional activity for counselors wishing to maintain licensure or certification. Depending on a counselor's degree or certification, continuing education is mandated by state, agency, or organizational policies. Different governing bodies require different types and amounts of continuing education activities, but in general, continuing education serves to advance and maintain a counselor's body of knowledge and skills. More specifically, mandated [Page 111]continuing education facilitates continued expertise in counselors' field of study as well as awareness of new professional developments, and it protects consumers of counseling through instituting a regulated standard of minimum competencies. Lifelong learning, while an incidental effect of mandatory continuing education, can also be recognized as activities counselors engage in to augment preexisting knowledge for the purpose of personal and professional development rather than to fulfill a professional requirement. Although lifelong learning can be understood as a potential outcome of any continuing educational activity, the term continuing education is more commensurate with the formalized professional requirement and therefore mandatory continuing education will be the main focus of this entry.

Content

The content of continuing education activities is sometimes mandated, but it is more often flexible in order to allow counseling professionals to self-select areas of interest or new specializations or skills. States, agencies, and other governing bodies often require licensees and those they certify to obtain knowledge in particular domains to enable counselors to keep their expertise current and to introduce counselors to areas of new professional development. For counselors, those domains vary considerably but can include child abuse, ethics, multiculturalism, and legal issues. Some counseling professionals may be required to access continuing education in a certain topic area for a certain period of recertification or licensure. Continuing education topics reflect the diversity within the fields of counseling and therefore have an extensive scope. For example, school counselors, career counselors, and professors in counseling education will likely choose different counseling-related education opportunities in order to tailor their continued learning. Most regulating agencies approve continuing education opportunities and content endorsed by major national organizations such as the American Psychological Association, American Counseling Association, and American Association of Counseling and Development as well as state and regional organizations.

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