I would like to recommend that the board/agency consider a broad spectrum of activities as contributing toward meeting the continuing education requirements recently set forth by law.  I believe it is possible to meet the intent of the law without overburdening the individual licensee with for-profit organization supplied training.  I would like to recommend the board/agency review the “Continuous Learning Policy for the Department of Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Workforce” that is available at: http://www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/Docs/CL%20Policy.pdf.

A policy similar to that described in the provided web link allows credit to be awarded not only for continuing education in the form of traditional classroom learning but also allows credit for attendance at professional seminars/workshops/symposia, rotational assignments that amount to on the job training, teaching/lecturing and publishing papers or presentations at public professional gatherings.

Additionally, I would like the board/agency to consider developing their own web-based continuous learning modules that would be available free of charge to licensees and that would fulfill a portion of the continuing education requirement.  Given the broad range of licensed professions such training might necessarily be broad enough in scope to apply to all and be limited to topics such as ethics, relevant statutes and laws, best business practices and general systems engineering courses.  For a model of such courses I would recommend the board/agency become familiar with the Defense Acquisition University on-line training courses.  Such courses are designed to be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time and conclude with a simple multiple choice quiz designed to demonstrate comprehension of the supplied course material.

As both the board/agency and the individual licensees are impacted by this new law I would like to recommend that we make it easy on ourselves.  The easier it is to meet the new requirements the lesser the burden on the board/agency in policing/enforcing the new policy.  I doubt the intent of the law is to weed out or chase out licensees, rather it is an attempt to assure the taxpayers that a good faith effort is being made to ensure those entrusted with a license continue to uphold the standards met when the license was earned.  This can be accomplished with little more than few online courses and/or attendence at conferences and a signed statement that the training requirement was met that is sent along with license renewal fees.

I would be happy to discuss these issues further with the board/agency.