I’ve spent the last few years working at a pharmacy school, and my experience there has me thinking that professional journalism desperately needs to develop a culture of continuing education the way the health-care professions and some other fields have. Professional pharmacists, for instance, are required to earn a certain number of continuing-education credits each year to retain their licenses, and pharmacy schools, among other entities, help provide such opportunities by offering CE programs. In addition to attending these programs, pharmacists can also earn credits through self-study — reading certain courses or articles on their own and then completing related exercises. The programs and self-study projects are approved and assigned a number of credit hours by an accreditation body. The system helps ensure that practicing professionals are up to speed on the latest developments and research in their field.

One of the biggest problems in journalism right now is that many of its practitioners are not all that familiar with the latest relevant trends and technology. Yes, journalism schools are retooling their programs to adapt and provide a more up-to-date education for their students, but that doesn’t help the journalists who are already out of school. Given the rapid pace with which communication technology is evolving, it doesn’t take that long for skills and knowledge to become dated. Yet, there is no formal professional-development system to ensure that journalism practitioners are continually updating their knowledge and repertoire. That task is left up to the individual, and in the high-stress, high-workload, modest-compensation world of professional journalism, it is far too easy, even for motivated self-learners, to let things like attending workshops or reading about the latest journalism research fall out of sight and out of mind.

Journalism Organizations’ Responsibility

I think a big part of the problem is that unlike the health-care fields, one doesn’t need to be licensed to become a journalist (and rightfully so). The lack of a profession-wide licensure mechanism makes it difficult to implement a profession-wide continuing-education system. However, I think you can build a culture of continuing education without tying it to licensure. For example, professional journalism organizations can independently require their employees to fulfill a certain number of hours of professional-development activities each year as part of the terms of their employment.

With that, of course, comes the obligation on the part of the companies to make sure their employees have the time to fulfill those requirements. That means setting aside a certain number of hours for each employee to pursue CE activities and creating an environment that encourages employees to seek out such opportunities.

There are several benefits to the news organization in this. First of all, it would ensure its journalists are up on the latest practices in the field, which can only help the organization’s work. Secondly, it could be leveraged as a recruiting tool — “Come work for us and we’ll give you time to help yourself add new skills.” That second point would obviously also be a motivation for journalists to pursue continuing education, and it’d become even more so if more and more news organizations begin adopting this approach. You may not need to be in a continuing-education program to be hired for a job at a news organization, but if that organization is taking steps to make sure its employees have the latest skills, then chances are you’d have a better shot at a job there if you have the latest skills as well.

Journalism Schools’ Responsibility

It is not enough to merely have news organizations impose CE requirements for their journalists. There needs to be a rich variety of CE programs available for those journalists. This is where journalism schools come in. I did a quick search to see how many journalism schools offer continuing education for professional journalists and was rather disappointed. Of the 56 schools on this list, only seven mentioned a CE or professional-development program on their Web site:

• Ball State
• CUNY
• Columbia University
• UNC-Chapel Hill
• NYU-SCPS
• University of Oregon
• University of South Carolina

Note: The list I linked to is obviously not comprehensive, but I think it is large enough to be a representative sample size. I went to each school’s Web site and looked for links to the effect of “continuing education” or “professional development.” On sites with a search box, I searched for “continuing education” and “professional education.” It is possible that some of the other schools do offer CE programs for journalists, but if you can’t find it through the navigation or easily through a site search …

Many of the schools offer graduate programs and fellowships that provide further training in journalism. However, such programs require the journalists to give up their current jobs for at least a year for a fellowship and more than that for a graduate program. Family obligations, financial burdens, and the prospects of having to find another job in a tight job market make these programs an unfeasible option for many working journalists.

In addition to the relatively few CE opportunities being offered by J-schools, a number of the ones I did find were simply not very accommodating for the working journalist. A weeklong immersion program is no doubt useful, but how many journalists can take off from work for a whole week and plop down a couple thousand dollars plus travel and hotel expenses to attend such programs? Worse yet are the programs that are spread out over several weeks. If attending for a whole week is difficult for many journalists, attending for one or two days a week for four or five weeks in a row would likely be impossible unless you happened to work within driving distance of the program site and have a very accommodating employer. Basically, such programs are occasional indulgences — something that a relatively few get to do once every few years if their schedules and budgets allow — rather than an ongoing process of continual learning for the masses.

Frankly, I think journalism schools are doing a disservice to their alumni by not having more comprehensive CE offerings. Think about it: You graduate from a J-school with (you hope) the latest skills. Five years later, a chunk of those skills are probably in need of an update, but journalism schools offer few opportunities for you to do that without quitting your job and incurring major expenses to enter a graduate degree program. Meanwhile, the schools have updated their degree programs’ curricula and are producing new graduates whose skills are more up to date than yours, thus making it more difficult for you to compete with them for that next job.

Aside from doing right by their alumni, J-schools also might benefit from CE programs in several ways. For one thing, it’d foster stronger ties between faculty at the schools and journalists in the field, spurring more opportunities for academia-industry collaboration. Secondly, the CE programs could be an additional source of revenue, especially if they’re designed in such a way that they can be offered to a large number of people at the same time. Third, it helps the schools be more connected to their alumni and helps those alumni be more competitive in the job market, which probably doesn’t hurt when it’s time to ask those alumni to send in their donation checks.

If we’re to build a culture of continuing education in journalism, then the nature of the CE programs being offered must change. Comprehensive weeklong or multi-week programs have their place, but we need a much greater number of shorter, less expensive programs. Also, these programs should be designed with the idea of being accessible to journalists regardless of where they are. In an era where you can produce a livestream with just a laptop and a webcam, surely a school of journalism can whip up something to deliver good online sessions to off-site participants. Delivering programs online would also eliminate physical limits on how many people can attend and probably cut down on the cost of holding these programs, making them affordable to more journalists.

How It Might Work

Here’s a scenario of how a CE system for journalism could work:

A journalism organization hires journalists based on the usual criteria — skills, experience, potential, etc. All employees of the company are required to fulfill, say, 15 hours of continuing education each year. The company sets aside a number of each employee’s annual work hours (let’s just say 40 hours — a mere five days per year) specifically for such activities, covering the duration of the programs, travel time, and time for the employees to devise ways to apply the new skills and knowledge to their jobs. That last part is important, because what good is going to a seminar if you have no time afterward to digest what you learned there and think about how to put it to use? If the budget allows, the company might also set aside some money to cover a portion of the employees’ CE expenses, though I’m not counting on this last part, at least not in the current environment.

The CE programs can come from several sources. The easiest thing to do would be for the company to organize internal sessions, led by employees in various departments. A photographer can teach reporters the basics of taking a decent photo, for instance, since reporters are increasingly being asked to do that for some of the events they cover. The company can also partner with several journalism schools and, where it makes sense, other entities to create CE programs that are designed to appeal to various types of journalists. For instance, there would be a selection of programs for reporters, a selection for copy editors, a selection for programmers, a selection for ad salespeople, etc. In addition, each focus would have courses targeted at people with different levels of expertise so that an experienced programmer can opt for a more advanced programming session while a beat reporter who’s interested in learning about programming can take an introductory workshop or something specifically geared toward how reporters can use programming in their work.

These CE sessions would vary in length and cost, but most would be relatively short (an hour to a day) and at a reasonable price ($50 to a few hundred dollars). Also, as much as possible, these sessions would be delivered online as well as in person (you’d pay more for in-person). That way, instead of having to leave their jobs for a whole week and spend a couple thousand dollars for an intensive immersion program, journalists would spread it out, spending $50 for an hour-long online seminar here, two or three hundred dollars for a four-hour, hands-on program there. What the schools might lose in offering less expensive programs can be made up by having many more attendees than before.

The journalists would be able to earn CE credits by:

• Attending the aforementioned CE programs offered internally and by partner schools.
• Leading internal sessions (which encourages people to share their expertise across departments).
• Attending other relevant conferences or workshops.
• Learning how to use new software programs through online learning sites such as Lynda.com, documenting that learning experience, AND using those programs in their work.
• Reading pieces about relevant trends and new practices, logging and sharing what they read, AND coming up with ways to put into practice the ideas from those pieces.
• Other activities as approved on a case-by-case basis.

With that system in place, the company would then make CE part of its employee-evaluation formula and tie in various incentives to reward employees for putting what they’ve learned from the CE activities into practice. The hope is that under this setup, journalists would not only be required to keep their skills current, but would also have incentive to actively seek out new skills, in part to fulfill their CE requirements and in part because there’s a carrot dangling in front of them.

Each journalist would fulfill the requirement through a combination of the above activities according to their own scheduling and budget limitations. So if you can’t afford to go to several sessions at a partner J-school, you can make up for it by doing more reading and online self-learning. And by requiring the journalists to not only read or learn new software programs, but to also come up with ways to put that knowledge to use in order to get CE credit for it, it would help spur experimentation and innovation from the bottom up, which is desperately needed at many traditional news organizations.

If a couple journalism organizations can do this and show tangible, positive results, others would follow, and with luck and time, it could become a common practice in the industry. However, it would not prevent outsiders from breaking into the business the way a licensure system would, since 1). you don’t need to work for a journalism company to be a professional journalist, and 2). even if you do want to work for a journalism organization, your lack of prior CE experience would not hurt you as long as you have up-to-date skills, regardless of how you obtained them.

So what do you think? Too crazy? Will never happen? Already being done somewhere and I just don’t know about it?