The transformative power of approaching your requirements as anchors for learning instead of hoops to jump through
This post was first published on my Medium blog—follow me there for the most up-to-date entries!
When organizations talk about continuing education compliance requirements, the conversation is almost never about learning architecture. It’s usually about the market reality that clinicians need credits to maintain licensure. If you’re a device company, a professional association, or any organization that serves healthcare professionals, you quickly learn that “CE approved” is not just a quality signal. It is a selling point.
And underneath it all, there is an even simpler message: Attendees will pay us for the CE approved course so they can get their credits. That commercial framing quietly reduces continuing education compliance requirements to a marketing feature instead of a design framework.
That mindset is exactly why CE so often gets treated like a hoop to jump through. A thing to get, so you can promote it, sell it, or check it off the list. The irony is that the standards behind CE approval were never designed to be a hoop in the first place. They are a set of anchors that keep education grounded in adult learning principles instead of floating away into content clutter.
So if you’re designing a training, it’s worth taking time to approach the continuing education compliance requirements with the right mindset. They are valuable tools that will help you plan an impactful, meaningful, and effective course.
The continuing education requirements are fairly consistent
I have attended and reviewed enough CE activities over the years to see patterns clearly, and I can attest that the core requirements for CE are remarkably consistent across professions and accrediting bodies. Whether you are dealing with nursing, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, dietetics, or other healthcare disciplines (as I have), the language changes but the structure is familiar.
Across the board, continuing education compliance requirements tend to include the same design elements:
- Identify a specific target audience
- Document a practice gap or learning need
- State an overall learning goal tied to that need
- Write measurable learning objectives
- Align content directly to those objectives
- Use methods that support application, not just exposure
- Provide resources that extend learning beyond the session
- Evaluate outcomes in a way that matches the objectives
Call them whatever you want. They are still the same eight elements. These elements mirror what any structured instructional design approach would require, including ADDIE, and they align with adult learning principles. Adults do not learn well through disorganized exposure to information. They learn when the experience is coherent, relevant, and clearly connected to real world decisions. Let me say that again, because it’s exactly what’s missing many or most of the courses or trainings I’ve seen over the decades:
- Coherence
- Relevance
- Clearly connected to real-world decision-making
Those factors are exactly what continuing education compliance requirements are designed to protect.
Where planning usually goes off the rails
For more than 40 years, I’ve been involved in every aspect of continuing education: as an attendee, as a reviewer on CE approval teams, as a committee member for healthcare organizations that wish to offer courses or training for CE credit. And that last one is interesting: In the first phases of planning a CE-approved offering, the first thing that the planning committee asks is almost always some version of, “Who can we get to speak for our annual event?”
Roughly translated, that question means, Who is popular right now and will fill the seats and therefore our corporate coffers? Who has a recognizable name? Sometimes even, Who is local so we can cut down the budget for travel?
That is not the place to start.
The place to start — long before taking on the continuing education compliance requirements — is the learning gap. What is it that the attendees cannot do today that you want to help them be able to do? What decisions are they struggling to make? What skills are outdated or inconsistent? What behaviors are getting in the way of better healthcare outcomes?
Until you can answer those questions, you are not designing education. You are booking talent.
What I actually see in the wild
I can speak from all sides of the learning experience. I first submitted my own courses for CE approval in 1988, and many since then, too. And, I’ve been on the review team for more than one of the CE approvers. I’ve attended scores of continuing education courses.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that a large percentage of CE learning activities (“courses” or “training”) I have attended or reviewed are a mishmash. They’re a collage of slides, disconnected facts, semi-important quotes and stories. They throw in some stock photos and glossy visuals that add nothing to the make a point — much less meet an objective. There is often no clear through line — that is, no unbroken connection between what learners cannot yet do, what the course wants them to be able to do, and how every element of the course supports that shift. On the whole, there’s no explicit link between what the learner is hearing and what the learner is expected to do differently afterward.
The content isn’t necessarily “wrong.” It is simply unanchored. A fact here. A statistic there. A story about a patient. A beautiful image that signals credibility but does not support learning. A key takeaway slide that sounds important but is disconnected from any measurable objective. Then, at the end, a satisfaction survey that asks whether the speaker was engaging.
That is not education. That is content delivery. And content delivery rarely produces improved learning, much less improved clinical behavior.
Ask yourself: Are we treating the requirements as paperwork or anchors? Without anchors, you won’t see improvement in the day-to-day performance.
Continuing education requirements: Hoops versus anchors
Hoops are external. You jump through them after the fact so you can claim approval. Anchors are internal. You establish them from the beginning, and they hold the course in place so it does not drift into randomness.
When treated as anchors, the CE requirements force intentional design decisions before content multiplies. They connect the practice gap, the objectives, the learning methods, and the evaluation. If you want your students to have a legitimate shot at learning, those anchors are foundational.
If the internal goal is simply to sell courses that offer credits, then CE becomes a hoop to jump through. But if the goal is improved practice and stronger organizational performance, then continuing education compliance requirements are far more than a box to check. They are the structure that gives professional education a real chance to result in better healthcare outcomes.
Need help delivering meaningful continuing education that treats compliance requirements as a launch pad instead of a checklist? DM me on LinkedIn to start a conversation today.
This post was first published on my Medium blog—follow me there for the most up-to-date entries!