Continuing Professional Education
Queeney (2000) defines continuing professional education (CPE) as “the education of professional practitioners…[that] extends their learning…throughout their careers” (p. 375). Given the increased demand for accountability in today’s workplace, the goal of CPE is to help ensure an established level of professional competence. It also encourages the transfer of learning back to the job. With its focus on practitioners, CPE is very similar to the concept of worklong learning via a human capital paradigm—thus aiding professionals to build their storehouse of skills and knowledge in preparation for contributions to generating tangible goods and traditional forms of capital.
To meet the challenges of providing continuing professional education, Queeney introduces a number of strategies that professional educators need to apply. These include: “Building Effective Partnerships, Assessing Professionals’ Educational Needs, Designing and Delivering Practice-Oriented CPE, Performance-Based Program Evaluation, Inter-Professional CPE, …[and utilizing] Distance Education” (Queeney, 2000, p. 380-388). Since a definition of learner needs is an important underlying component of effective continuing professional education, let us examine the subject of needs assessment both in theory and practice.
Needs Assessment Theory
Needs assessment for professional education most typically includes components of performance analysis, task analysis, goal analysis, and audience analysis. With audience analysis in particular you can identify what motivates the learners and thus devise ways to tap into their internal and external motivators per the primary assumptions of Knowles’ andragogical model (Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 2005). In practice, needs analysis can range from full curriculum needs assessments to course needs assessments. Rossett (1987) defines training needs assessment as “the systematic study of a problem or innovation, incorporating data and opinions from varied sources, in order to make effective decisions or recommendations about what should happen next” (p. 3). Techniques for needs analysis include review of existing materials, questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. Additionally, one of the most critical things to remember about analyzing learning needs is to not blindly accept someone’s proclamation of a performance problem. As Queeney cautions, “all too often programming decisions are made not on the basis of needs assessment” (p. 381). Mager & Pipe (1970) also warn, “What people identify as ‘the problem’ often isn’t the problem at all. It is merely a symptom of the problem” (p. 2). Additionally, do not jump to the conclusion that training is the correct solution. The performance problem may not be a skill deficiency that can be solved via training, but rather something in the environment that either is an obstacle to performance or even rewards non-performance (Mager & Pipe, 1970).
Needs Assessment in Practice
As both Rossett and Queeney describe, needs assessment can take many forms from the simple to more complex. Based on my experience as a workplace learning and performance professional, I have seen and conducted needs assessment at all points along this continuum. When conducting needs analysis for an individual program, simpler forms of needs assessment typically are adequate. For example, focus groups and discussions with content experts, the target audience, and their supervisors can help to define where the performance gaps lie and thus help inform the most appropriate design for the learning solution. More extensive needs assessments are appropriate for large-scale learning initiatives where entire curriculums are being evaluated. For example, when a company institutes a new competency model, the curriculum needs to be realigned to the competencies and gaps analyzed to identify learning needs. Additionally, if the learning function within an organization is seeking to realign itself as a corporate university or to aid the shift in the organization becoming a learning organization, that is often another situation for which a more extensive needs assessment would be appropriate. In these cases, the needs assessment will often involve a combination of techniques including surveys (with multiple versions for each audience and their immediate supervisors), interviews, and focus groups.
Queeney’s (2000) argument on “the increasingly entrepreneurial demands of [the professional educators’] organizations and institutions [that force] them to adopt cost-effective strategies for designing, developing, and delivering CPE” (p. 380) is very true. With all needs assessments, the challenge often involves getting buy-in for the time and expense of conducting the assessment. Thus, the professional educator needs to be well-adept at justifying the effort—including being able to articulate the potential risks and costs of not completing the assessment. Additionally, they need to be creative in determining a low cost approach that still results in valid information upon which to base their design and development decisions. Resistance can also be dealt with by not referring to the up-front analysis tasks as a “needs assessment,” but rather to incorporate the needs assessment analysis tasks into the content gathering and design work that accompanies the beginning of learning initiatives. For course-level analysis, that is often the best and most creative work-around to ensure the needs assessment is completed.
References
Knowles, M. S., Holton, E. F., & Swanson, R. A. (2005). The adult learner (6th ed.). Burlington, MA: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. (Original work published 1973)
Mager, R. & Pipe, P. (1970). Analyzing performance problems. Belmont, CA: Fearon Pitman Publishers.
Queeney, D. S. (2000). Continuing professional education. In Wilson, A. L., & Hayes, E. R. (Eds.), Handbook of adult and continuing education (pp. 375-391). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Rossett, A. (1987). Training needs assessment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
- Robin
Copyright Robin Donnan 2008. All Rights Reserved.
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