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Continuing Professional Education and Human Capital Theory.

Continuing Professional Education (CPE) may be defined as “the process of engaging in education pursuits with the goal of becoming up-to-date in the knowledge and skills of one’s profession” (Weingand 1999). Both theory and practice surrounding continuing professional education have been fragmented with providers of CPE identifying with their individual professions and not with the field of adult education (Mott & Daley, 2000) or human resource development (HRD). Yet, CPE has been recognized by adult educators as an important area of study and practice since the 1960s (Houle, 1980; Cervero, 1988; Queeney, 2000). For instance, adult education graduate programs teach students effective practice in CPE as facilitators, program planners, and administrators (Cervero, 1989). CPE is a growing concern for both adult education and HRD because of four trends: the amount of CPE offered in workplaces is surpassing CPE offered by other providers, CPE is increasingly being offered by universities through distance education, collaborations between universities and workplaces are expanding, and using CPE to regulate professionals’ practice is increasing (Cervero, 2000). In 1988, Cervero estimated that 25 % of the workforce claimed membership in a profession; this estimate could only have increased over the years (Cervero, 2000). As more professionals become corporate employees, CPE has become an important phenomenon in many workplaces making it the responsibility of HRD practitioners to manage and facilitate. As a result, during the last decades, the amount of CPE offered at the workplace has grown more than any other type of education (Cervero, 2001). Consequently, CPE at work takes resources away from training other classes of workers, the CPE-providers require more education and expertise increasing the costs of securing and retaining trainers, and since CPE is mandated by professional associations the content, timing, and costs to provide it are less controllable by the employer. Cost benefit analysis and return on investment are terms that are increasingly being used by HRD to support training as a sound investment in human capital (Cascio, 1987; Fitz-enz & Davison, 2002; Swanson, 2001). Human capital has caught the attention of scholars and practitioners outside the economics domain since it is increasingly seen as the “profit lever of a knowledge economy” (Fitz-Enz 2000). Without a workforce that is constantly increasing its knowledge and skills, organizations cannot remain competitive (Fitz-Enz and Davison 2002). Most theoretical and empirical research has implicitly been concerned with cost-benefit analysis for training at the individual or societal level (Burke 1995). Cost-benefit analysis for CPE for individual organizations or for their customers has been rather scarce in the economic literature. The field of human capital theory has contributed to research on training while paying little attention to the distinct characteristics of continuing professional education or the differences between training and CPE. This is due to the fact that the estimation of costs and benefits of CPE is not as straightforward as it would seem at first sight. Training and CPE are different in ways that make a simple application of training models to understanding the costbenefit analysis of CPE, impossible. While standard principles from cost-benefit analysis can be used to determine why, how and how much an organization invests in training, these same principles do not directly apply to CPE.