From continuing education to continuously educated: Is CPE serving its purpose?

We all know the one person who always finishes their entire CPE requirement over five frantic days a week before the deadline: They’re playing videos in the background while skimming documents and answering tests on autopilot, sometimes by just flipping a coin! Many times people treat CPE like a vaccination you take whether you want it or not. This may be a controversial point, but it does raise the question of why exactly learning or upskilling for one’s own career growth has become such a bitter pill.

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So many people take CPE just to take CPE. It is why we have audit associates completing CPE in human resources just because it fell under the “general” category. It is why we see tax partners watch “Introduction to Excel Essentials” just so they can check a box. There are still loads of relevant, engaging and genuinely useful CPE courses out there, but there are also so many that are none of these things at all.

Instead of asking how many hours of CPE one should be completing, isn’t it better to ask what CPE one actually needs? Rather than looking at education from an hours-based perspective, what if it was competency-based instead? What if there were different CPE learning pathways for accountants of all different career levels and specializations?

From counting hours to making hours count

Say an audit associate got his CPA license with less than two years of work experience. He’s still required to take 40 hours of CPE credit. What if, instead of having him choose whatever CPE he wants, he followed a more structured competency-based framework? Instead of taking whatever fills the credit hours, he could take courses on entry-level audit learning, workpapers, standards, AI tools, systems, ethics and other competencies actually required at his career level.

I’m not suggesting we hire the CPE police or anything, I’m simply asking whether the CPE framework could be more connected to what someone actually needs to know. Imagine if supervisors could view a CPE competency dashboard report on a regular basis and understand which associates could be assigned which work and what training they would need to do that work well. This dashboard might describe CPE competency in terms such as: “Associate X has completed 12 hours of workpapers training but is short on Standards CPEs by two hours in Digital Assets” or “Associate Y is up to date on workpapers CPEs but short on Ethics CPEs by four hours.”

The objective is still continuing professional education. But instead of simply asking whether the professional has accumulated the required number of hours, we could ask whether those hours are actually helping build the competencies needed for the person’s work and career.

No one-size-fits-all CPE

Think about it. An audit associate, audit manager and audit partner may all be CPAs, but do they need to learn the same thing? No, of course not. A CPA at entry level is not the same CPA at partner level. Likewise, two people at the same level may have completely different learning needs depending on their industry, previous CPEs, clients and upcoming assignments.

This gets even more complicated when considering that big regulatory updates happen all the time too, completely upending what people need to know. But even here, the level of understanding required from an associate in this case is way different than that required from a partner, obviously.

So perhaps the real CPE problem is not that professionals don’t have enough learning available to them. Perhaps it is that the right learning does not always reach the right professional at the right time — and that creates another problem.

How do you personalize CPE for thousands or even millions of professionals without creating an administrative nightmare? How do you know what Jim needs to learn? How do you account for career level, previous CPEs, specialization and upcoming work? And how do you keep all of this updated every time standards, regulations and technology change?

Could AI be the answer?

Imagine an AI tool that could identify what a professional needs to learn, recommend relevant CPE and create a continuously updated learning pathway rather than leaving professionals to simply accumulate hours? It might give suggestions based on someone’s work profile and previous courses completed. For example:

Name: Julie Peters
Profile: Statutory Audit Partner
Experience: 10 years
Industry: Banking
Previous CPEs: Cybersecurity, Fraud, Client Relationships
Knowledge Gaps & Recommendations: DataSnipper AI tool, Latest OCC Heightened Standards Thresholds

Something like this could open new adaptive learning pathways that would show clear roadmaps for competency building and career growth versus something imposed on them by statutory requirement.

For instance, imagine Julie is about to audit a new AI startup next quarter. She has never worked in this sort of industry before and needs to quickly update herself on digital regulations and governance frameworks. Imagine her AI tool has already picked up this information from her work assignment and suggests all the CPE topics she needs to learn for this assignment.

This experience could be curated for different levels. Imagine an audit manager and an audit associate on this same project. Do they all need to learn the same thing as Julie, the audit partner? No, of course not! The CPE AI tool could suggest workpaper techniques for the associate, workpaper review and reporting for the manager, and risk and governance standards for the partner. Likewise, the number of hours need not be the same at all levels. Maybe workpapers need fewer hours or governance standards need more hours or vice versa.

And let’s go back to those big regulatory updates at the SEC, FASB or IRS. What if the CPE AI tool picked up the regulatory change and broke it down into several pieces meant for people at different career and understanding levels and explained it using case studies, examples and scenarios? Instead of waiting for everyone to find the right CPE course, the learning could potentially find them.

And instead of treating CPE and ongoing learning and development programs as two separate things, why not combine them with AI? An employee could login before work, spend two hours learning about new tax updates, then walk into the office with both useful knowledge and CPE credit hours. Using AI, these lessons might even be able to incorporate their daily tasks and projects to create real case studies based on real life scenarios that can be used to not only maintain credits but train teams while sharing live, real-time feedback.

Now CPE stops becoming something we remember when the deadline approaches and becomes something that happens in response to new regulatory changes, new work assignments or identified competency gaps, based not on some abstract lesson but real life examples drawn from the professional’s own experience. 

The limits of AI

Having said all that, let’s still understand that AI is still a tool, not an educator with decades of infinite wisdom. It comes with very serious risks of hallucination, possible outdated rules, missing exceptions, oversimplification, incorrect citations and confidentiality concerns.

Therefore, like any other AI situation, this CPE AI model would have to be audited and governed. The content cannot simply be generated by AI and automatically treated as authoritative professional education. There would need to be authorized, tested and governed frameworks with appropriate stakeholders, professional experts and human oversight. And professional judgment cannot be outsourced to an algorithm.

But with sufficient supervision and guardrails, such AI could become an outstandingly adaptive, cost-effective, real-time updated solution to address CPE and L&D training woes.

AI may not be the answer to every CPE problem. But if it can help deliver the right learning, to the right professional, at the right time, perhaps we can finally stop treating CPE as an annual race to collect hours.

After all, the goal was never to be continuously credited. It was to be continuously educated.