Keeping Up
As the days of 2006 draw rapidly to a close, many financial advisers—certainly those with professional designations—will likely find themselves scrambling to fulfill, or at least to document, their efforts in pursuing continuing education.
Not every designation has a continuing education requirement, of course, and some are fairly generous both in terms of what constitutes “CE’ and over what time period you are allowed to acquire it. If you’re one of those who tend to scurry around to accumulate three years’ worth of CE in the last three months before the deadline, my guess is that you are hardly alone.
There is, of course, a difference between scrambling to document CE and actually pursuing education on a continuing basis. There is also, sometimes, an unfortunate difference between obtaining meaningful education, and pursuing educational credits that will satisfy the various and sundry requirements associated with designations but that may not always have as much connection to your current job focus as they once did.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping those older designations current—though it’s worth the effort not only to consider their relevance to the services you perform for your current clients, but also to help your clients understand and appreciate that relevance (see Alphabet Soup, PLANADVISER, Fall 2006). In fact, I’ve often wondered what the result would be if keeping our college degrees in good stead required some form of continuing education.
Those of you who exercise regularly can attest to the benefits of doing so—of simply making some kind of regular, physical exercise part of your daily routine. On the other hand, those of you who exercise irregularly can no doubt speak to the pain associated with only sporadically undertaking some form of physical exercise (particularly as you get older). The same things hold true with the mental exercise of reading and learning. Granted, you aren’t likely to require an elastic bandage for your overextended brain the way you might on that hyperextended knee, but it’s a lot easier to stay current in this business if you devote regular time to it on an ongoing basis.
In my experience, working with retirement plans requires a constant commitment to learning—on topics as diverse as market trends and economics, the regulatory environment, and what passes for “state of the art’ in terms of platform capabilities and service delivery. Getting “rusty’ in any of those areas will, in short order, put the viability of your practice at risk. Yet, for many of us, there is no valid, systematic means for us to track and record the myriad things we read, hear, and discuss every day that help keep us at the top of our game—other than the physical requirement of continuing education.
However, while there is value in the mere discipline of fulfilling any CE requirement—even more when that requirement actually is applicable to your current focus—one hopes that it isn’t all about simply filling some arbitrary gap to maintain a designation, nor should it be the kind of program that one crams into a short window of time. Continuing education should be just that: continuing, in the sense that it is best pursued regularly over a finite period of time, and it should be education, in that it truly informs and expands one’s knowledge level. Beyond that, the best programs contemplate education that adds personal and professional value not only to the designee, but also to the profession for which they are designed.
Nevin E Adams is dean of the PLANSPONSOR Institute, the education arm of PLANSPONSOR.Nevin also is editor-in-chief of PLANSPONSOR magazine, and the creator, writer, and publisher of PLANSPONSOR.com’s NewsDash. A 28-year veteran of the retirement services industry, he graduated magna cum laude with a BS in Finance, and later received his JD from DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.