I want to offer Continued Education Credits (CEs) to mental health counselors. What are my options?
It’s a question I’ve received more often lately by Colorado professionals. I’ll preface my answer by sharing that each State and designation (LPC, PsyD, LCSW, etc.) is different. Please do the research for your state and designation or consider credentialing at the National level. When approached with this inquiry by the community, I ask the following questions to better understand their goals:
Why Offer CEs as a Professional?
Perhaps you have the goal of creating secondary income streams. Maybe you feel passionately about the content you’ve created. Whatever the reason, CEs allow professionals to enhance their leadership and public speaking skills, not to mention open doors to new opportunities, including paid speaking gigs, podcast interviews to enhance exposure to your brand and services, program partnerships, and project collaboration!
What is Your Content Area?
The first thing to consider is your content. Is your training content specific to mental health competencies like group work, clinical supervision, or a theory or modality? If so, you may be eligible to apply for a national CE provider designation.
If your content is more closely connected to business aspects such as marketing, private practice growth, and secondary income streams, these areas are still valuable to share with the community, but cannot be branded as CE opportunities due to them not meeting the traditional definition of continued education credits.
Do You Want to Offer In-Person or Online Events?
This is a logistics question that will help narrow down your application options. Some organizations are only approved to do live or in-person events. Others have permission to offer webinars and on-demand content. Consider what is most important to you. Do you like the feeling of being in front of others speaking? Would you rather develop an on-demand course people can take at their own pace? Take some time to consider the possibilities before answering the remaining questions below.
What is Your Mental Health Background?
It’s easiest to apply to offer CEs through your own professional affiliation, such as through NBCC (counselors), NASW (social workers), APA (psychologists), NAADAC (addiction professionals), etc. Visit their website to learn more about their application process.
Who is Your Audience?
Is your hope to serve fellow mental health professionals in your state? Or reach further? In Colorado, CEs can be developed for counseling professionals statewide with the following structure in mind:
A. A sign-in sheet recording participants in attendance
B. Provide a certificate of attendance/participation that outlines the following:
I. Title of Event
II. Contact information for the Faciliator including Name, Credentials, Address, and Phone
III. Duration of the event in CEs, with one CE equal to one contact hour
IV. Identifying if the event was live (in-person) or virtual
In other words, Colorado is pretty easy for folks to offer CEs. Other states may not embrace this same structure in having their own rules and parameters of what can be branded as CEs, so be careful to confirm what’s allowed based on where your audience is located. This also becomes important in marketing your course or content accurately.
What’s Your Timeline?
Many people are motivated to develop and launch a CE opportunity in a matter of weeks. That may be possible for Colorado, but for offering CEs in other states and/or at a national level, be prepared for the process to take six months to a year!
For example, to become an Approved Continued Education Provider (ACEP) through the National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC)—which means offering CEs for counselors nationwide—the application requires several examples of the workshop or training already being offered, with sign-up sheets and evaluations from participants submitted with your application. This means that for many, test driving your content with a local audience to get the feedback you need to apply is necessary.
What if You Don’t Have the Time or Bandwidth for this Process but Still Want to Offer CEs?
Consider partnering with an established CE provider who has permission to develop coursework with partners in the community. This usually means bigger organizations like community mental health agencies, treatment centers, mental health hospitals, conferences, and training centers.
I’d like to personally give a shout out to the following organizations that provided a professional platform for my workshops before I became an ACEP Provider, who made the process easy to reach fellow clinicians around quality content:
A. Harmony Foundation, Inc.
B. Sandstone Care
C. Continued.com
D. Highlands Behavioral Health
Organizations are always looking for additional speakers or presenters to offer new CE content. By researching organizations in your area that offer CEs, you can pitch your idea to them and work to get on their CE event schedule.
So there you have it! Although there may be some lingering questions about offering CEs, these elements are worth reflecting upon when identifying your ideal path for trainings or workshops offered to the mental health professional community at large. I encourage you to continue to track the requirements in your state and designation for ongoing changes and prepare for the long haul when starting the application process. I can assure you it will be worth the effort if you feel passionately about your content being connected to more professionals!