How to Validate Education

There has been a great deal of buzz lately about the recent announcement from the NCBTMB regarding their advanced certification credential (tentatively scheduled for spring 2010). There is still considerable controversy within the profession about an advanced credential and a number of serious issues that must be sorted out. I have written before of the need for an advanced credential focusing on the healthcare/medical applications of massage and I sincerely hope this is the direction the organization chooses to pursue with this credential.

Regardless of the type of advanced certification that the NCBTMB chooses to pursue, they will have to grapple with a sticky issue when it comes to eligibility criteria. The nature of an advanced exam suggests that education above and beyond the entry level will be required to sit for the exam. However, in this profession we don’t have any existing model to evaluate what that advanced education looks like.

The most common method of evaluating additional education would be to simply add up hours of continuing education (CE) courses that an individual has taken. However, there could easily be loads of accumulated CE hours in topics that don’t significantly contribute to an individual’s advanced knowledge for addressing compromised health care conditions. There could also be years of clinical practice in a medical setting where there were no formal educational hours earned, but the environment was a valuable educational experience. How will the NCBTMB grapple with these diverse educational environments when attempting to evaluate advanced education? It remains to be seen how this will be done, but it will certainly be one of the most difficult aspects of developing this new credential.