I wouldn't object if the program included educational material of real substance, but very little of what passes for “continuing education” for architects, engineers and other design professionals deserves to be called education.  It would be very much appreciated if the Commonwealth of Virginia would refuse to go along with what most states and professional organizations are complicit in, i.e. pretending that valuable time spent on virtually content-free lunches and seminars is actually education and should be required of design professionals.

We should not be given a learning unit for sitting through a salesman’s pitch on this year’s vinyl tile selection while eating a free sandwich, and no one should pretend that this activity in any way resembles education.  We design professionals know what professional education is from our undergraduate and graduate coursework, and if we’re to be required to meet a continuing education requirement, it should be for genuine education and not what’s commonly accepted as meeting continuing education requirements in other states.

I’d be happy to take eighteen hours of university coursework each year and actually learn something of substance, e.g. by an engineering professor explaining in detail the physical behavior of a pressure equalized rainscreen wall system.  But we shouldn’t be required to waste our time on the low quality, terribly insubstantial lunch seminars and the like which the professions pretend constitute education.  Probably an average hour we spend working provides more new knowledge than we get in many of these seminars.  Granted there are some continuing education seminars which are decent and fairly substantial, but they certainly seem to be the minority.

If we’re going to have a continuing education requirement, let’s make it real education.  If we’re not serious enough to make it real, let’s not pretend and waste our time.  The emperor of continuing education has no clothes, Virginia.  You have an opportunity to not join the pack of lemmings headed for the cliff, but to make a principled point instead.  Let’s be honest with ourselves about what education is and what it isn’t, and let’s be honest about how much annual education we’re willing to accept as busy professionals.  Let’s either make it real or not burden ourselves with a farce.