CPE requirements
may get tougher and tougher. That’s the latest rumor in the industry, anyway, and many people are taking it at face value given these economically uncertain times. After all, it can’t hurt to keep up your credentials in the fiercest job market in six decades!
Whereas once relegated to the backburner of a professional’s commitments, continuing education has assumed a more urgent focus now that even professionals such as lawyers and accountants can find themselves out of work! Many turn to burnishing their accreditations, gladly meeting the newly heightened CPE requirements.
Yes, to be sure, it’s just a rumor, and not very plausible in some respects – after all, why would the certifying bodies involved want to make things harder for their member? – but there’s something particularly juicy, if you will, about the story, isn’t there: more evidence that the end of the world is just around the corner!
In any case, adequate preparation is the best antidote to any such change in the CPE requirements of a profession, said preparation being the kind of training that is expection of someone who is a professional, a modern-day professional, whether lawyer, doctor, or accountant.
Still, it’s hard not to shudder at the sign of the times such rumors constitute, the fear that is our Zeitgeist, where even properly accredited and widely respected professionals should dabble so in such a thing as rumor mongering. For example, no greater herald of our age than the New York Times has taken to many articles of late curiously observing the spectacle that is law school enrollment, what with increasing numbers of students (and profits) while job opportunities and income levels drop in inverse proportions. How can anyone, particularly one who has devoted years of schooling, not to mention several tens of thousands of dollars, to a profession not shudder, not fear?