What is the Continuing Professional Education / Continuing Professional Development?

Continuing Professional Education/Continuing Professional Development (CPE/CPD) refers to the inculcation, assimilation and acquisition of knowledge, skills, proficiency, and ethical and moral values, after the initial registration of a professional, that raise and enhance the professional’s technical skills and competence.

Nature of CPE/CPD Program

The CPE/CPD programs consist of properly planned and structured activities, the implementation of which requires the participation of a determined group of professionals to meet the requirements of maintaining and improving the occupational standards and ethics of the professionals.

Thoughts on Continuing Professional Education

Continuing Professional Education (CPE) in one’s profession is indicative of a person’s genuine concern for his present and future work. Professional associations are one of the avenues through which CPE is realized. Updating members of professional associations on current issues relevant to their field is unquestionably important. Moreover, professional associations must aim at competence-building and performance enhancement among their members. Likewise, professional associations should take great interest in molding the characters of professionals by inculcating their core values and the related positive attitudes among their members, which should ultimately translate into ethical behavior.

Continuing education is the aggregate principles and practices encompassing education of individuals after they have left the formal system. Continuing education includes continuing professional education and further nonformal and informal education and training. Continuing education must be understood in consonance with the UNESCO’s definition of adult education, which:

denotes the entire body of organised educational processes, whatever the content, level, and method, whether formal or otherwise, whether they prolong or replace initial education in schools, colleges, and universities, as well as in apprenticeship, whereby persons regarded as adult by the society to which they belong develop their abilities, enrich their knowledge, improve their technical or professional qualifications, or turn them in a new direction and bring about changes in their attitudes and behavior in the two-fold perspective of full personal development and participation in balanced and independent social, economic and cultural development

Continuing education is closely linked to the notion of lifelong learning, which is the body of theories and principles espousing that education and learning occurs as a continuing process throughout a lifetime. Lifelong learning, therefore, encompasses the following: initial education, which is the period of continuous formal study (and ‘youth training’) completed before entry into main employment; further education, which refers to education oriented toward more specific occupational or life skills, rather than academic degrees; and recurrent education, which is the distribution of education over the lifespan of an individual in a recurring way. Recurrent education implies the alternation of education with other activities, of which the principal would be work, but which might also include leisure and retirement. Today, continuing education has emerged as the preferred category to describe the education of adults, and has been extended in recent years to encompass parts of initial education as well as the core territory of post-initial education and training.

The literature on continuing education reveals that it aims to achieve any or a combination of the following objectives:

• Improve the adaptability of the labor force to technological change.
• Invigorate educational institutions.
• Facilitate more flexible labor market adjustments to changing requirements.
• Enable a better interplay between educational and other social sectors, including a better contribution to the potential necessary for economic growth.
• Enhance continuing personal development, motivation and learning behavior of adults.
• Enhance individual freedom of choice and opportunities for self-development.
• Provide better opportunities for individual development.
• Restore and protect the employment prospects of particular individuals and groups.