When I worked around lawyers in some of my past business lives, there would always be days when they were totally unavailable. The reason was something called “CLE”. As I came to found out, the full term is MCLE – Minimum Continuing Legal Education and while the requirements vary by state bar association, in general lawyers need to take courses in everything from ethics (ahem) to professional responsiblity to changes in law in areas of specialty.
Image via Wikipedia
So here is my question: what are you doing to satisfy the same sort of requirement in your business life?
There’s an expression that “the wheels of justice grind slowly but exceedingly fine” and yet lawyers are constantly studying to keep up with changes in their profession. The wheels of tech and media move a hell of a lot faster and so keeping up with professional studies is imperative.
Over the course of the last couple of days, I’ve spent several hours taking a course to improve my professional knowledge. In my case, it had to do with some advanced topics on search marketing (I know – way more fun than most topics) because help with search is becoming a more important part of what my clients require. While the course I’m taking is on a professional education site (and isn’t free), there are plenty of opportunities for anyone with an interest to learn. Years ago, one had to get on a plane and travel, pay the conference fee, and were at the mercy of conference schedulers if there were parallel sessons one wanted to attend. Today, nearly every conference (at least in the tech field) is either streamed (live or delayed), live blogged, tweeted via dedicated hastags, or accessible to anyone at almost any time. And those are just conferences.
There is plenty of available information to improve one’s knowledge of just about any professional topic, so the issue, as usual, is us. We need to make the commitment, plan the time, and do the research. I am – are you?
Consult Keith 