How to Improve Your Continuing Education Program and Stay Competitive
Offering continuing education (CE) credits is a two-way street. As much as your participants are learning from you, you are learning as much—if not more—from them. Your program content should adapt over time as you receive feedback, identify which learning objectives participants are struggling with, and hone your presentation skills. Explore some of our top recommendations to improve your CE program and help participants get the most out of your content.
Identify Your Primary Audience
Identifying who is going to participate in your program is a valuable evaluation tool to make sure your content aligns with your intended audience. Ideally, it’s something you start thinking about before creating your program, but it’s also helpful to review afterward so that you can improve your marketing and materials.
Not all CE programs are able to meet the needs of all mental health professionals. That’s why we recommend finding a niche that aligns with your expertise, such as EMDR, Integrative Medicine, or Addiction and Substance Abuse. Remember that the wider the net you cast, the harder it is to communicate the benefits of your program.
These questions can help you begin to identify your primary audience:
What is their profession?
Are your participants mainly social workers, marriage & family therapists, nurses, or professional counselors?
What are their greatest continuing education needs?
Are your participants looking for hands-on training, a lecture about an emerging form of trauma therapy, or a new modality to practice during client sessions?
Where do they live?
This is especially important when thinking about licensure and whether your program is offered online or in-person.
Advanced Certificates
Beyond licensure, many mental health professions have a number of certificates available that you can earn throughout the course of your career. Certificates are a way of proving that you have advanced knowledge in a specific modality or practice.
You can target the content of your CE program to meet requirements for certification, whether it’s becoming an EMDR Certified Therapist or a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. Keep in mind that to offer a program that’s part of an official certification process you’ll likely have to go through a third-party screening process.
Career Growth
Not all participants are licensed mental health professionals. An underrepresented market among CE programs are people who are considering a career change or are interested in learning more about mental health topics that are adjacent to their own profession. Enrolling in a course or webinar that offers CE credits signifies to future educators or employers that they are willing to put in the hard work to become mental health counselors, social workers, or nurses.
The more you define your ideal participants, the more you can target your program content to meet their needs and desires. You’ll find that you end up reaching more people this way, versus trying to appeal to everyone’s need for CE credits. For example, we’ve discovered an overwhelming number of social workers are searching for EMDR training. You can use insights like this to your advantage by adjusting your marketing to speak to social workers and share your program with local or online social worker communities.
Review Your CE Company Evaluation
After a participant completes your program, they will be asked to fill out a program evaluation. These evaluations are invaluable tools to help you improve your program and the instructor’s performance. You will learn how participants thought the instructor presented the subject matter, if they were knowledgeable about the content, whether the program material was relevant to their practice, and more. It’s ok if it seems intimidating, it’s not always easy to receive feedback. But know that the evaluations are there to help you learn from your experiences and to continue to improve.
One of the most important questions in the evaluation is whether the learning objectives were achieved. Identifying which learning objectives were understood and what was difficult to comprehend is key to improving your program content for future participants. There’s also room for participants to leave comments and suggestions, which can be helpful as you think about new methods to help your participants better understand the concepts you’re presenting.
Calculate Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
After a participant completes your program, they will be asked to fill out a program evaluation. Evaluations are requirements for a majority of CE programs however, they are not required for participants to earn a CE certificate. These evaluations are invaluable tools to help you improve your program and the instructor’s performance. You will learn how participants thought the instructor presented the subject matter, if they were knowledgeable about the content, whether the program material was relevant to their practice, and more. It’s ok if it seems intimidating, it’s not always easy to receive feedback. But know that the evaluations are there to help you learn from your experiences and to continue to improve.
Tips to Improve Your CE Program Experience
After identifying your target audience and gleaning as much insight as possible from your program evaluations, it’s time to put your newfound knowledge and recommendations into practice.
Apply Universal Design Principles
Programs that follow universal design principles can be “accessed and understood,” as much as possible, by all people. It takes into consideration someone’s age, disability, cognitive ability, and other attributes like experience with technology and access to transportation.
As you create or iterate your program content, think about how you can incorporate closed captioning and transcribed audio. Take a look at the readability of the text you use on slides and how much keyboard navigation is required to participate as well. It’s well documented that programs that are created with better accessibility in mind end up benefiting all participants.
Improve Your Participants’ User Experience
How your participant engages with your program, not only its content, is key to your success. User experience speaks to how someone is able to navigate an online platform like Zoom as well as someone's overall experience in a physical space, such as if there are water and snacks available.
Before a webinar, think about ways you can troubleshoot any technological challenges or have a moderator on hand to assist participants so you can continue the program. For in-person programs, visit the space and locate the temperature controls and note anything you’ll need to bring to make the program a seamless and enjoyable experience. The less someone is thinking about the environment, whether in-person or online, the more they’re engaging with your valuable content.
Incorporate Visuals & Interactive Exercises
Gone are the days of simple PowerPoint presentations with text and screenshots of spreadsheets. Look through your content and ask yourself how you can use a chart, image, or video clip to explain concepts. Not only are visuals more engaging, but they’re more likely to be remembered over time.
Interactive exercises are also helpful to explain more complex topics in a simpler format. Online programs can ask questions for participants to answer in the chat or, depending on the size of the group, place participants into discussion groups. In-person programs have much more flexibility to implement group exercises, use handouts, and ask for volunteers to help demonstrate a theory or technique, to name a few. Incorporating short quizzes throughout a course or seminar can also help boost comprehension and increase engagement.
Ask Participants for Testimonials
Your program evaluation can be used as a tool to identify participants who may be advocates of you and your program. The asks participants to expand on their ratings in the evaluation, but it can also be helpful to hear from them directly, whether through a brief phone call, email, or in-person conversation. It strikes a different tone when you ask participants directly for suggestions to improve versus only sending out the required evaluation at the end of a program.
By asking customers who rated your program well for testimonials, you can use them as social proof to get others excited about your program. Testimonials can be one of the most effective marketing tools of your program since former participants vouch for you to their peers, versus it only coming from you.
Knowing how best to improve your CE program can take a bit of trial and error. You may find that videos work better than text on a slide, or that your target audience enjoys discussion groups more than continuous lectures. Remember that it’s not only about the content you’re teaching, it’s how you present it. It’s best to keep moving forward and learn from your experiences so that both you and your participants are able to create a learning environment that benefits you both.