This was an article recently posted on Laura Allen’s blog, “The Massage Pundit.“. Allen has a lot of information that is valuable to both continuing education providers and to therapists. Thank you, Laura, for your efforts on keeping us informed.
From Laura Allen, nationally certified massage therapist and bodyworker:
I love teaching. It isn’t my primary source of income, but it’s important to me to get that interaction. I feel energized after I’ve spent the day in a class with a bunch of people who actually care about learning something.
The CE river is rolling along, the water is getting pretty muddy, and we’re all going to have to sink or swim.
Every time I turn around, it seems that something is on the horizon that affects CE providers–and the therapists who are obligated to get CE in order to maintain their license. As a provider myself, there are certain states I’ve never visited because of the hoops you have to jump through. New York, as I reported last year, requires a fat fee of $900 to be a provider, and a New York-licensed massage therapist has to perform the hands-on portion of any CE training. I don’t pretend to hold myself in the same class as Erik Dalton or Ben Benjamin, but it does seem strange to me that someone with a Ph.D. can’t perform the hands-on portion of their own class unless they have gotten themselves licensed in New York.
The opportunity for continuing education here in North Carolina is so competitive, it’s almost overwhelming. We have about 8,000 active licensees, and 145 CE providers who live in the state–that doesn’t count the folks who are traveling in from elsewhere to teach. If you only count the ones who actually live here, that breaks down to 55 students per provider per renewal period, so if you’re wondering why it seems to get tougher to attract students, basically it’s because there’s a CE provider on every corner. While some students will seek you out because of what you teach or who you are, there are hundreds of others who are just looking for the closest class so they don’t have to travel, or the cheapest class they can get due to their finances, or they’ve procrastinated so that they just take the first thing that comes along when it’s time (or past time) to renew.
To read the rest of this informative blog post, click here.