Society Adds CE Flexibility To Its Forum Next Year

Society Adds CE Flexibility To Its Forum Next Year

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At the next Society of Financial Services Professionals’ Financial Service Forum, agents will be able to earn continuing education credits without the requirement of attending all of the sessions.

“In the old days, you had to be at all of the sessions or you got nothing,” says Marshall Lipson, assistant vice president of professional development for the Society of Financial Service Professionals, Bryn Mawr, Pa.

The new filing method to be used by the society will break each session into its own block of credit. “Each group of sessions, each time slot is independent of the others,” says Lipson.

Now, if you don’t go to a session you don’t lose the hours you’ve already earned, he says.

The way that CE credits were formerly applied for resulted in one program, says Lipson. “What that means is you have to be there for the entire program. If you show up late or leave early, you don’t get any credit at all for the program.”

Lipson notes that attending an entire program can be difficult, even stressful to an attendee when the program spans a period of several days. “Anything can go wrong–an emergency call, a late meeting,” he says. “So, we’ve removed a lot of the anxiety from the attendees.”

The reason why the forum was always applied for as one program was primarily due to costs, says Lipson. “There were some economies of scale with labor costs and some state filing fees, but it was a multiple progression that made it economically very difficult to deal with,” explains Lipson.

“This year we said we were going to bite the bullet, pay the price and build in the most flexibility we possibly could,” he says. “Each session in our program is applied for separately.”