Posted at 3:36 AM Sunday, August 15, 2010 by Khan
Continuing Education Comes Packaged in Various Forms

equired CEUs and Professional Certificates Deliver Necessary Know-How

Online degree programs seem especially well equipped to administer continuing education programs designed for professional adults with career benchmarks to achieve. Undergraduate certificates, post-baccalaureate, and post-graduate certificates may all satisfy continuing education requirements. However, special online continuing education providers develop unique and targeted material specific to professionals in particular fields:
  • Healthcare
  • Mental health
  • Education
  • Business
Continuing education, in its strictest sense, is a job requirement for many professionals, particularly those in service-oriented careers, such as nursing, teaching, and social work. Professionals must fulfill a set number of units annually, often called CEUs or continuing education units. Before the birth of useable, online learning environments, CEUs were earned by attendance at annual conferences, and industry-related seminars and lectures, not always convenient and not always effective methods for the conveyance of contemporary job-specific information.
Online CEU portals are usually under contract from businesses and industries that track employees’ continuing education. These services supply specially developed continuing education products for particular types of professionals in certain fields, and with particular credentials. Online quizzes or short exams serve to measure knowledge retention of key concepts and may figure significantly into an employee’s performance record.

Global Demands Increase Need for Widespread Workforce Education

Nurses and teachers are no longer the only professionals required to bend to the demands of continuing education. Almost any career specialization requires employees to logon and learn fresh job-related skills and concepts. Technological turnovers and workplace globalization have acted together to drive this need forward. Moore’s Law may be easily applied to many types of technical jobs, which are outdated as quickly as next generation computer chips can be developed—every one-and-a-half to two years. This is the boiling point, and most career-motivated professionals know when they need a career tune-up.
In situations like this, many professionals, including business execs, electrical engineers, computer programmers, paralegals, technical writers, and slews of others, seek high quality brands of continuing education for their own career goals: to remain as current and competitive as possible in business arenas where younger upstarts come out of school already armed with cutting edge technical savvy. This is where online degree providers gain traction with certificate programs.

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