Podcast 90: Managing Complex Professional Education Challenges

EPISODE 90: Managing Professional Education

Tamer Ali, CEO and Co-Founder,  Authentic Learning Labs

What kind of learning system does a professional education organization need to succeed? The answer isn’t as simple as you may think.

That’s why I’m excited to welcome back someone who understands this topic inside and out. He’s one of our most popular guests — Tamer Ali, Co-Founder and CEO of Authentic Learning Labs.

Talking with Tamer is always fascinating because he’s one of the smartest learning technology innovators I know. So, please join us as we discuss timely continuing education issues and trends on this episode of the Talented Learning Show…

MANAGING PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION — KEY TAKEAWAYS

• At first glance, continuing education programs may seem easy to manage. But when you’re targeting doctors, lawyers or skilled professionals in fields with stringent, top-down accreditation requirements, the process can be mind-numbingly difficult.

• Professional education providers face mounting pressure from all sides. For example, the COVID-era shift to online delivery quickly reset expectations about when, where and how participants prefer to learn. Yet, providers are still struggling to keep pace with ongoing digital innovation.

• Unlike learning systems built for K-12 schools or corporate employee training, specialized professional education systems are designed for the unique needs of organizations operating in highly regulated industries. This kind of solution can help providers save time, money and effort.

MANAGING PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION – Q&A HIGHLIGHTS

Welcome back, Tamer. To start, why don’t you update our audience on Authentic Learning Labs?

Well, for more than two decades, we’ve worked exclusively with organizations that provide external audiences with professional education.

To be clear, this isn’t K-12 education or standard employee training. Rather, it involves an organization’s members, customers or partners who are driven to take a course by a mandate or for other reasons. They may be regulated by state or federal or professional bodies. They may need to stay relevant in a their industry. Or they may need to meet certain requirements within some type of time frequency.

Many organizations that provide this kind of professional education are nonprofits, but they operate like businesses. While some are businesses that operate very much like an official education body.

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It’s important to understand that continuing education comes in multiple flavors. What’s the difference between simple and complex professional education?

The simple stuff is what we call checkbox continuing education, where people need to meet standard credit requirements. The frequency varies, depending on your profession and location. It could be every five years, two years, or even more frequent.

Tracking those CE units is simple for us. For example, in any given state, a healthcare course will have a specific credit count — and those credits may vary, depending on your role. So, for the same course, a surgeon may be able to earn a different number of credits than an allied health professional.

But, among organizations and governing bodies that are educating these professionals, checkbox learning is no longer enough. Instead, they want to know if people are really investing time in learning. Are they retaining this knowledge? Are they meeting the learning objectives?

To focus on things like performance improvement, we need to track more data and analyze it more deeply.

Interesting. So, what is “basic” to you is “complex” to others. Which industries have more complex professional education needs?

Obviously, demand is high across the healthcare spectrum — from surgery and nursing to all the peripheral sciences and everything in between.

Legal professionals have similar needs. Every state has a bar with different requirement categories — ethics and beyond. Lawyers have to keep up. And with so much competition, it’s not enough to just be a lawyer anymore. Many want to specialize.

In addition, financial services, engineering, architecture, real estate and others rely heavily on professional education. They have specific regulatory requirements and these professionals face continuous demands.

Makes sense…

Obviously, when professions require ongoing development beyond college years, there is strong interest in occupational licensing. But beyond the simple process of obtaining and keeping a license, people need to stay abreast of all the advances in their field.

And now, technology is revolutionizing the professional education process, itself.

How so?

In the past, people earned continuing education credits by attending a live conference or reading a journal. But those standards have taken a big hit. Increasingly, they’ve been questioned over the past 10 years. And in the aftermath of COVID, some of these groups are experiencing a bit of an existential crisis.

Now that multiple generations are comfortable with digital experiences, these groups just can’t offer professional education in the same way anymore. They’re feeling more pressure to diversify.

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No doubt. And managing this kind of professional education isn’t just about adhering to regulations, but also reporting back to central bodies. How does that work?

Yes, we understand those reporting requirements and the need for data. It’s not just verifying that someone took a course or scored a 90%. It also includes all the related details. What state are they in? What are the requirements? What are the credits?

That information typically is reported to the organizations we serve, and then to the parent body. So, usually an intermediary receives the data and then sends it to the reporting authorities.

This mothership acts as a neutral body that looks across the data to answer a variety of questions: What courses are offered to various professionals? Who completed these courses? What format did they use? How many credits were earned? And what proof exists of their performance?

And what if an LMS vendor has a strong set of APIs? Is that enough to realistically integrate with reporting systems at these governing bodies?

You don’t want to assume it will work if they don’t understand the formatting, the data and the requirements around it. They may not even have the structure and the competency to generate and share data about content progress and performance.

If those things aren’t in place at the start, then they won’t be able to share the necessary information downstream.

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Right. What are the top capabilities for professional education that you won’t find in a standard learning system?

Most organizations we work with have hit a ceiling. They’ve hacked together a professional education solution based on a corporate or academic system. And this has led to one or more issues:

1. Delivery Challenges
It may be impossible to deliver to one or more clients because the capabilities don’t exist to segment users, or to support specific functionality (like video or assessment or tracking) at the necessary level.

2. Insufficient Data
Whether it’s about reporting official regulatory stuff, or simply about understanding what people are doing, these organizations often don’t have enough of the right data needed to do business.

3. Lack of Domain Expertise
Professional education providers compete in a highly complex market with challenges that a standard learning system can’t meet. For instance:

• They deal with large for-profit companies, and even venture-funded organizations that sell instructional content to the same audience.
• They’re likely to work with “gray market” providers that an association or professional education body has approved. These look like partners, but they’re really “frenemies.”
• Internal stakeholders, board members and education teams constantly ask for new things to keep an organization’s offerings relevant. It’s vital to prioritize effectively.

4. Scalability and Performance Barriers
When you manage internal corporate learning, you can tell all employees that the LMS will not be available tomorrow. But that won’t work for doctors, lawyers or nurses who need to complete their CE requirements. They need access to your professional education system at all times.

Let’s dig deeper into content access. You can’t always get users to an LMS to participate in continuing education. How do you overcome that kind of hurdle?

This is where a specialist platform can be a big advantage. Here’s why…

…For complete answers to this and more questions about advanced professional education solutions, listen to this entire podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Amazon, or right here on our site.

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Find Out More About Authentic Learning Labs

Want more details about how this specialized solution powers professional education? Check the Authentic Learning listing in our learning systems directory — including company/product information and videos. Or visit Authentic Learning Labs online.

ALSO, check my Hot Take Review of Authentic Learning Labs on YouTube:

Need a Better Way to Manage Professional Education? Let’s Talk

As an independent learning tech expert, I’m prepared to help you choose the best tool for your organization’s needs. For a free 30-minute consultation with me, John Leh, Lead Analyst at Talented Learning, schedule a call below…

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