Continuing Education - Validating Virginia BPOR Effectiveness?
OK. The proposed requirement for Professionals' Continuing Education in Virginia seems to be a well-intentioned response to other States' actions. If I were running the Virginia DPOR, it would give me concern that our Department might lose status among our peers, if we did not have a similarly effective program in place.
Measuring the effectiveness of our program of Continuing Education, to justify continuance after a review, say 12 months following implementation, will be a most difficult, quarrelsome, and resource draining (but for a select few, a rewarding!) experience.
Previous comments overwhelmingly question the necessity of CE for maintaining licensure, the tone of some of which clearly show the emotions an additional 'Layer of Bureaucracy' will have regarding taxation of both our Government's and our Individual resources. And of course ALL Government expenses directly or indirectly are the burden of 'The Private Sector', except for individuals who do not pay taxes.
Most/All of Virginia's and the Nation's Technical Professionals place the use of a professional 'stamp' with a seriousness beyond description. This importance drives the Professional to 'know all the angles', in itself commanding 'Continuing Education' with at least checking the most recent regulations and component/system technical data.
If the requirement for Continuing Education measure is implemented in Virginia, due to the extreme diversity of 'work performed' by current licensees, it will be a virtual, no, an actual morass to allow 'Continuing Experience' to qualify as 'Continuing Education'. The DPOR would need an actual Army of both Professional Experts and Legal Experts to secure Liability of such a program. So, some sort of Recognized Authority (ie: ISO 9000, 14000, etc.), perhaps validated by The United Nations, would police Virginia's program.
Another, easier method will be to have set, generic offering of a few hundred certified courses in areas outside, but associated with our technical fields of practice, such as in medicine, international relations, the global population conundrum, biodiversity, ‘the national debt’, etc. Then, we can validate attendance to such courses, attendance being the only qualification for ‘a passing grade’. Perhaps attendance will highlight the seriousness of 'stamping drawings'.
Measurement of Actual improvement in Professional Proficiency or ‘Safety in Virginia’ is impossible, except by tracking trends of ‘before vs. after’ work over a few hundred years. Even a program so convincingly appropriate to saving lives in Virginia as the ‘war on DUI’ by our Enforcement Professionals, on the surface, resulted in a higher rate of fatalities. There is utter silence on this matter, whereas if highway fatalities had not increased, or the numbers had decreased even slightly, the Program Promoters and Citizens would have been dancing in the streets.
Case in Point of ‘easy’ data measurements is the arrival of “Global Cooling” over the past 12 months, which cancelled out the accumulated temperature increase of the past 100 years. Brother Al, what happened, other than the ‘global panic’ to obtain carbon credits, which suddenly withered away?
