Why Continuing Education Courses are Important After Getting Your License
After you got your license, there’s no doubt you breathed a sigh of relief and happiness. After years of school, followed by additional hours logged studying to pass the exam, it’s a breath of fresh air when the worries about high pressure testing situations are over.
But being done with the exam doesn’t mean you’ll stop learning! The vast majority of states require Continuing Education Courses, or CEUs, in order to maintain your license. Offered in online and in person formats, these courses are more relaxed than exam preparation and ensure you stay mentally engaged in your field well after getting your license.
Along with maintaining your license, here’s why it’s important you stay engaged in continued education after you get the license:
Stay Up To Date in Your Field
In graduate school and while studying for your licensure exam, you learned about all the research latest techniques in psychology, social work, therapy, or counseling. When you graduate and move into being a practitioner, these developments will continue. As a practicing therapist, social worker, or counselor you’ll need to stay up to date on your field’s best practices to offer your clients the best support and treatment. CEUs make it easy to get up to speed while conveniently fitting into your work schedule.
Get Better at What You Do
You learn a great deal about your field in school and internship placements, but there are still situations that come up as a clinicians that you didn’t expect or learn about in school. CEUs are a convenient way to learn all the additional skills you need to be successful in your career. Whether it’s learn a new style of therapy or case management or learning about working with a completely new client population, CEUs have you covered. CEUs are designed to be practical and help you learn quickly, so you’ll develop professionally at a rapid pace.
Maintain Professional Connections
Staying professionally networked becomes more challenging after graduate and obtaining licensure. Your support network of classmates and professors are less accessible, and you’re probably no longer part of a study group of clinicians getting ready for the exam. CEUs are just the way to network and stay professionally involved with others in your field outside of your workplace. Meeting others working in your field, whether in person or virtually, is especially important if you run your own practice and have limited regular contact with other professionals.
It’s Fun!
Outside or our professional obligations, continuing education is an opportunity to gain your own personal enrichment in any subject in your field that you’ve always wanted to learn about. CEU courses offer an important break from our professional work to use our brains and interact with others in a format that’s engaging and low stress. Fun is good for us, too; research suggests that adults who stay engaged in continued learning after finishing school report higher life satisfaction and are less likely to develop dementia down the road.
At AATBS, we believe continuing education should be readily available to all licensed professionals and offer affordable online-based options. Every month, we offer a mental health CEU course for only $1. You can check out which discounted course we’re offering this month athttps://www.aatbs.com/CE-Course-of-the-Month.
