Continuing Education is a topic that is often overlooked by many in the IT industry. But what are CPE/CEU? Why are they important? What role do they plan in renewing certifications? What role can the play in choosing a new cert to get? Come find out the answers to these questions and more in this article to provide tips and tricks for managing your certifications!
Continuing Education, which can have the acronyms of CPE or CEU, are used by certification organizations to help keep the certification holders stay up to date on the topics of the exam. Certification organizations commonly use continuing education in many fields from nursing and IT. In the IT field, continuing education takes one of the terms such as CPE, Continuing Professional Education, or CEU, Continuing Education Unit.
Although some certifications used to not require CEU, but now, the majority of well known certifications will require CPE in some capacity. Some certifications still do not require renewal, such as the ITIL certification.
However, not every CPE/CEU program is equal as they vary not only in how many years, how many units are required, fees, and how they can be obtained widely vary.
Some certificate education programs are done with the intent that they can be renewed with other certifications, whereas, others require only that vendors certs. This makes it harder to renew the certification through actions that one could perform that could be used to expand their general security careers. For example, some vendor specific technologies require getting a higher certification to renew; which would require focusing on that technology, even if one changes roles or expands their interests into another technology.
When choosing a new certification, make sure to understand if the new certificate continuing education can be achieved in the same ways that work well with existing certifications. For example, if the CPE activities and time for the new cert can align with the existing certificates, one can spend less time renewing certifications and more time learning new activities. Sometimes, a new certification will renew another certification, such as getting the CISSP will renew the Security+.
Some certification programs require minimum numbers of CUE per year, whereas other programs don’t require minimum per year. Knowing this can help spread out when and how to renew.
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