Environmental Determinants for Organizing Continuing Professional Education

Abstract

Offices of continuing professional education (i.e., CPE centers) are organized to link learners and knowledge resources via learning formats and needs assessment procedures. Two primary organizing dimensions, a service and an education orientation, were evident in a sample of 184 CPE centers randomly selected from lists of centers serving clergy, attorneys, education, and health professionals. A division of the centers into four groups based on scores on these two primary orientations allowed a test of environmental influences. A discriminant function analysis weighted 19 environmental variables to distinguish service-oriented centers from education-oriented centers with an accuracy rate of 92%. Conclusions direct us away from profession and parent organization as the basis of classifications for organizing CPE providers. In their place are posited functional orientations of CPE centers and characteristics of their environments.