(Source: Education Corner)
Last week’s blog ended with the following two short paragraphs:
Mid-career or career-shift education seems to be the right remedy for acquiring job-relevant knowledge of the fast-changing reality. Adult education is being offered now in many colleges. I will expand on this issue in my next blog.
I’m not sure that everyone needs to go back to school but we do need to take care of dangerous gaps in our knowledge as they affect our decisions, especially when those decisions can have such an enormous impact. I will discuss this more in next week’s blog.
This blog will try to put some content behind these statements.
A broader introduction to continuing education is cited below:
Continuing Education is a form of education that most professionals need to pursue after their formal education to have the most updated knowledge in their field of expertise. There are many mediums and methods for such programs; they would vary from one-time classes, conferences, online courses, and post-degree programs.
Although not all professions require this continuous learning, most specialized careers do. For example, in the medical field, doctors need to continually study and learn new and advanced methods for treating their patients. Health care specialists need to stay current in improving the welfare of everyone. The same thing applies to lawyers, politicians, scientists, professors, and many more experts.
This will prepare you to handle new responsibilities and create better opportunities too. With the continually changing of the globalized society, continuing education will be more commonplace shortly. Even notable people and people in business around the world are advocates of it.
Learning is a lifetime process, so make the most of it by taking advantage of the different sources and platforms for continuing education.
The key relevant sentence in that quote is the last one, particularly in an environment in which reality changes are accelerating at the rate that we are observing.
An earlier blog that was focused on the forecasted population decline (March 7, 2023) showed a global map comparing changes in the 65+ age group, between 2015 and 2050. It indicated a major increase in elderly people. I focused specifically on the developed world, where this shift is accompanied by major increases in social spending on this segment of the population. A more recent accounting goes even further, predicting a decline toward 6 billion by the end of the century (from about 10 billion at the peak around the mid-20th century) with a commensurate accelerated increase in the proportion of the elderly. These newer data indicate that the largest 15 countries by GDP all have fertility rates below replacement (this includes India and China) and that globally we are quickly approaching replacement.
I am 84 years old. My wife is younger but not by much. We both have tenure at the same school, and have decided not to retire as long as we can be effective, both in our teaching and service to our institution. Throughout our long academic careers, we have also had the opportunity to take sabbatical breaks, during which we were able to observe the accelerated changes in the reality that surrounds both our professional and private lives. This practice is not unique to our institution; it runs across much of the academic world.
I have mentioned earlier that I have family in France, with whom we are trying to maintain as much contact as we possibly can (see the December 18, 2018 blog, in the context of the Yellow Vests demonstrations). One of the family members, a physician by profession, visited us a few months ago, with her immediate family. She stayed for a week and enjoyed the experience. I asked why she couldn’t stay longer, and she answered that she had to return to work to take over a temporary managerial position. I asked her to consider taking a sabbatical in NYC so we could spend more time together. She didn’t know what I was talking about, and I realized immediately how unique academic situations are. I tried to Google to find out which companies offer a paid sabbatical to their employees and I got a list that looked more like opportunities for extended vacations. They are nice but they are not academic sabbaticals.
I am fully aware that most people go through life without the benefits of higher education. This is particularly true in developing countries, but it is also true in rich countries. The numbers are shown in Figure 1. The bigger issue is primary education and not higher or continuing education (for many, it comes down to gender equity more than the availability of educational institutions).
However, the issues of equity in educational availability and the availability of continuing education are different. In today’s environment, attaining higher education in some form is not a prerequisite for understanding changing environments. It is, however, a tool required to successfully adapt to the changing environment and be able to make a living. There is a difference.
Figure 1 (Source: UNESCO Institute of Statistics via World Resources Simulation Center)
At least in developed countries, and many developing countries, the infrastructure for higher education exists. The infrastructure for continuing education also exists but is a bit chaotic. Higher education is focused on degree programs: you register for a degree, the school states the requirements for the degree, and you follow them. Usually, the degree programs are divided into departments, each of which administers the degree in its particular areas. In principle, most of the courses that are available for degree programs are also available for general education. However, many of the courses (especially in the sciences) are vertical, meaning there are prerequisites for taking them. For a degree program, the responsible departments will set out a degree map, which ensures that you will meet the prerequisites. If you just enroll in a course, paying no attention to the prerequisites, chances are that you will be completely unprepared and will drop out of the course, wasting your time and money.
Back to the first of the two sentences I quoted at the beginning, from last week’s blog:
One of the best ways that is presently being employed to ascertain that job holders follow the changing realities and the progress in their specific areas is to require a license for practitioners. We are used to licenses that give us permission to do stuff, such as drivers’ licenses, passports, and identity cards. Many of the licenses come with expiration dates that require passing some tests before renewals. In the US, most of the licenses are issued by states. From personal experience, growing up and being educated in Israel, many of my friends who attended medical schools took the American exams to practice medicine in some US states as a matter of routine. The rationale was that the demanding tests should not be a problem immediately after finishing medical school but might present a bigger challenge after a year or two out of school.
Business News Daily has a list of professions that require a license:
You already know you need a license to become a truck driver, but did you know that nearly 1 in 4 occupations in the U.S. now require a license? According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 23% of full-time workers have a license or certification.
Requirements for renewals can be demonstrated by the following regulation in Texas:
Continuing professional education (CPE) is required to renew a standard certificate. Your certificate will be set to inactive status if you do not renew by the expiration date. CPE hours are required, even if your certificate has already been set to inactive status. Certificates cannot be renewed by completing examinations.
- Classroom teachers must complete 150 CPE hours.
- No more than 150 CPE hours are required, even if you hold multiple classroom certificate areas.
- If you hold an administrative and/or student services certificate you must complete 200 CPE hours.sw
- No more than 200 CPE hours are required, even if you hold multiple certificates, such as: classroom, administrative and student services certificates.
General CPE information is located on the Continuing Professional Education Information page, along with renewal FAQs.
I added the emphasis on the non-exam requirements to show that there are other ways to measure continued learning within a field.
License requirements are not based on the “noble” wish that we stay up-to-date in our professions. In many cases, the practice is also strongly motivated by the not-so-noble desire to limit competition in the profession. I reserve this issue for a separate discussion.
Should we require a license before approving a US supreme court judge or mandate renewal requirements? I don’t think so! There are effective alternatives. In the case of the US Supreme Court, the chief justice could try to periodically (once every five years?) sort the cases in front of the court into a semi-disciplinary data collection and (politely) ask every judge to be the point man/woman in that area. It would be at the judge’s discretion to determine if he/she needed additional education in his/her area. That judge would not have different voting powers in his/her areas of specialty, but he/she would be asked to update fellow judges on the latest developments in that particular field.
For higher education institutions, it would be both convenient and doable to expand existing educational structures to include certification demands. In today’s environment, this is already done in schools of education in universities.
