Accredited webinar programs are a great way to keep your employees (and even prospective MQLs) educated. It is important to be informed about current affairs in their industry, at the same time, they can be accumulating CE credits for their professional designations.

Today, we will be looking into the good, the bad, and the ugly of accredited webinar programs.

Since the founding of The Streaming Network; accredited programs have been a staple of our business. Toronto—where we live and work—is home to Canada’s Financial Services sector, which employs over 400,000 professionals and features head offices for all of the “7 sisters law firms.” It’s also home to the accrediting bodies for Accounting, Financial Advisors, and the Law Society of Upper Canada.

There are many accredited programs being delivered right in our backyard.

If you want to learn where to start for planning your own Continuing Education Webinar, watch our video for easy tips that can help get you started today.

The Good

If you organize or participate in any accredited webinar program, then you understand the benefits that accredited webinar programs have to offer.

They follow a simple carrot-and-stick strategy that traditional marketing webinars do not: simply attend and you will receive the credits necessary to maintain your designation.

Firms can now deliver accredited content both internally and externally, allowing them to leverage on-demand webinars for accreditation programs as well as prospective marketing.

This is a serious advantage for talent development and retention for these types of companies:

• The wealth management division of banks and financial service firms.
• Accounting firms of all sizes.
• Any law firm with a corporate division.

The Bad

As the need for easily accessible content grows in the form of live and on-demand webinars, the amount of work necessary to administer accredited programs increases as well. This is particularly true if your organization does this process manually.

For example, perhaps you need to track credits for the purpose of an audit.

Think about the time it takes to reply to your advisors, your employees and key customers who ask, “How many CE credits have you earned so far this year?” or “Can you send me that credit?”

Ultimately, your Continuing Education (CE) or Professional Development (PD) department will turn into a customer service department that spends its time checking credit status, sending out certificates of completion, or overall credit history. This takes up a lot of precious time and resources

BMO Global Asset Management estimated that its administrative costs topped $35,000 in employee time every year. Read the case study and learn how BMO “helped resource-stretched advisors learn and meet industry requirements for CE.”

The Ugly

Most firms deliver content for CE or PD through multiple channels, such as live events, without a centralized hub to track and administer every moving part.

Using multiple channels and manual administration can make it difficult for organizations to track CE Credit history. In turn, this becomes an ineffective way to use your resources.

How are you tracking your team’s Continuing Education credits?

Without a formal process, your CE team may spend their time sifting through an internal drive filled with scanned PDFs or handwritten attendance sheets.

The Solution

We created CE Central to solve this exact problem.

Initially, we developed it for our own financial services practice to fix various process and administration issues with accredited webinar programs. Then we learned about how bad it was affecting CE and PD professionals outside of our own organization. We decided to share our solution with others.

We expanded the platform in an attempt to solve all the aforementioned problems with one simple application.

CE Central is a webinar platform that tracks user behaviour and ensures the viewer qualifies for the credit (in both live and on-demand versions of the webinar). It then delivers the credit automatically in our Accreditation Widget. This widget will save the hassle of trying to locate your credit history, and automatically forward you the results.

Say a financial advisor or a lawyer wants to access their CE credit history. They can return to the webinar recording and retrieve the credit on their own schedule.

With all your CE data in one spot, you can get details such as attendance for every CE webinar program and the most frequent viewers in each one. This is crucial in developing a long-term CE strategy to keep your department at the forefront of skill development.

Check out our quick overview of what CE Central is and how it can help your team in under three minutes.

Watch our webinar for more details on how CE Central works and learn how it benefits your team by:

• Tracking and delivering certifications for both in-person and virtual events.
• Leveraging automated certificate delivery that saves time and money.
• Improving the experience for your advisors.
• Receiving online access of CE history for your advisors and downloading certificate histories.

With all your CE data in one spot, you can get details such as attendance for every CE webinar program and the most frequent viewers in each one. This is crucial in developing a long-term CE strategy to keep your department at the forefront of skill development.

My question for you is, how do you keep your team sharp?

Interested in leveraging CE Central in order to start saving on administrative costs? Sign up below and one of our CE Central experts will reach out shortly.