Executive Summary
Every practitioner who has been in business for any period of time has had the experience: the continuing education session being attended is bad. Maybe the content is useless or irrelevant. Maybe it's too simple, or too complex. Perhaps the speaker is just a poor teacher, or an ineffective communicator. In some cases, the instructor doesn't even know the content as well as the people who are supposed to be learning more about it!
And of course, when CFP practitioners - as with many professionals - have continuing education requirements, bad sessions perhaps feel ever worse. Not only might they feel like a waste of time, but they're a required waste of time!?
So the question emerges: what can be done to improve the quality of continuing education content?
The inspiration for today's blog stems from some conversations I had earlier this week with Michele Warholic, the CFP Board's managing director of exams, education, and talent, following my post earlier this week criticizing the CFP Board's recent changes to the content and instructor requirements for Ethics CE.
As I discussed in the earlier blog post, the CFP Board has "updated" the Ethics CE content requirements to a fairly narrow list of learning objectives that must be covered in order to qualify for Ethics CE, all of which related directly to parts of the Standards of Professional Conduct for CFP practitioners. My criticism in large part was that the learning objectives as defined excluded virtually all of the accumulated teachings of Ethics that have been developed over the past... 2000 years or so!
In response, the CFP Board rightly pointed out that bad and ineffective Ethics content out there - and in fact, that they had received many complaints about content received during Ethics sessions that did not feel useful or applicable for the practitioners who attended. So the CFP Board's intention was simply to define a series of learning objectives that would try to ensure (or at least, dramatically increase the likelihood) that the content taught in Ethics sessions would be relevant and applicable to practitioners, because the learning objectives themselves all tie directly into professional conduct issues that practitioners deal with in their day to day lives with clients.
Similarly, the CFP Board's new requirement that Ethics instructors have the CFP certification marks for at least 5 years is also intended to ensure that instructors can relate the content back to the realities that practitioners deal with. After all, a 5-year requirement ensures that the instructor has been a CFP certificant for some period of time, and even if the instructor isn't currently practicing with clients, the requirement for the designation - which itself includes a 3 year experience requirement - ensures at least some practical financial planning experience for any instructor. On the other hand, as I criticized, this also means that someone who has dedicated their lives to actually teaching Ethics is totally ineligible for teaching CFP Ethics CE (unless a policy exemption is requested, however feasibly that may turn out to be)!
I will give the CFP Board credit that, while I think a number of the policies being implemented here are, ironically, preventing the actual teaching of Ethics for what is an Ethics CE requirement, the goal and intention is simply to improve the quality and relevance of the content for practitioners.
But on the other hand, the reality is that problems with "bad" content are not exclusive to Ethics CE sessions. Should the CFP Board also create a list of six required learning objectives for the most common tax issues that practitioners face, and thereby ensure that all tax content will be relevant for practitioners (to the exclusion of all other tax content that might be taught!)? Should the CFP Board require all tax instructors to have the CFP designation for at least 5 years, to ensure that the instructor has financial planning experience to keep the content relevant, and exclude all CPAs and tax attorneys because they don't have CFP marks? I suspect most people would agree that the scenario sounds somewhat ridiculous in the content of tax content (or insurance, or estate, or any of the other practice areas for CFP certificants). So if it's not a reasonable approach for "improving" tax content, why should we view it as appropriate for Ethics?
So what do you think? Is requiring a CFP certification for at least 5 years an effective way to ensure good Ethics instructors? Is that a requirement that should be translated to other areas of continuing education content? Is it appropriate to try to ensure "useful" content by restricting a content area to a series of learning objectives that are known to be relevant, but exclude other content that might also be educational in the process? I have some of my own ideas about how to address these issues, which I'll discuss further on the blog in the coming days, but I'd like to hear what you think, too!
As with so many other fields, this action of the CFP Board tells me that the meaning of “ethics” for our industry is being reduced to “how not to get in legal trouble”.
As a current CFP(R) certificant, and a former professor of ethics, I have attended a number of really spectacularly bad CE sessions that qualified for ethics credit — but in most of those cases, the presenters did, in fact meet the new requirements!
Johann,
Thanks for the feedback.
Indeed, I can appreciate the CFP Board’s desire to improve the quality of content. I’m just not certain this is the best path to follow. Nor am I certain that excluding all other Ethics content except the CFP Board’s own Practice Standards and Rules of Conduct is right.
I’d be curious, given your background in Ethics, what other kinds of Ethics content you think would be helpful to teach in this setting?
On a related question, do you think the problem is a content problem, or just a “bad instructor” problem?
Michael,
I think there’s plenty of fertile ground that can be covered within the CFP Board’s materials. But I think that part of the problem is that most people believe that ethics, and moral values more generally, are something personal and probably therefore merely subjective or relative. If relativism is true, then there’s no particular point in (a) trying to reach any consensus on what our ethical values ought to be, or (b) trying to do anything more than keep ourselves out of jail.
I know that there’s not much of a consensus among philosophers about whether moral values are objective or subjective, but most of us do seem to agree that a kind of “naive relativism” is most likely wrong — that is, that phrases like “right for me”, as we hear them used in the popular culture, are simply mistakes. For my part, I’d love to hear more CE sessions that tie pieces of the Standards & Rules to philosophically interesting concepts — for example, I recently presented (and will present again soon, at the FI360 meeting in San Antonio) a session in which I compared the financial planner’s obligation to ensure that the client understands and agrees to the plan being presented (Standard 400-3) to a physician’s obligation to obtain “informed consent”, and discussed some of the limitations that some of the behavioral economics ideas about “framing” impose on both. Would a financial planner who hasn’t also taught medical ethics have made those connections?
I don’t know, but that leads me to your last question: “Content, or instructors?” I don’t want to suggest that all the Ethics CE hours should be taught by PhDs, but there was a recent article on a philosophy blog which argued the following:
“People are going to do philosophy one way or another. When a politician argues that a bill unfairly impinges on our freedoms, _he’s doing philosophy_. When someone expresses a belief in God, _she’s doing philosophy_. If we stop teaching people how philosophy is done, we’re not going to get less philosophy, we’re going to get sh!**y philosophy, which leads to sh!**y, incoherent policies.”
Trying to teach an hour-long course on an ethical topic is difficult, to be sure, but if we insist that not more than 10 minutes of that hour can be “about” anything other than the content of the Standards & Rules, we’re dooming ourselves to bad philosophy.