Your Guide to Finding (and Using) Helpful Pediatric Occupational Therapy Continuing Education
(Pre/Post Worksheet and CEU Tracker Included!)
Trying to navigate and choose quality, evidence-based, and relevant continuing education courses amidst all the noise can be extremely challenging.
There is only so much you can learn from a website or reviews as your individual educational needs and setting are unique.
I've spent some time reflecting on what has led me to the best courses and given me the information I need to improve the quality of my pediatric occupational therapy care.
Here are a few steps that I would recommend trying if you feel a bit overwhelmed and do not know where to start and want to feel confident that your continuing education budget is going towards helpful information.
Narrow down your focus
If you haven't already, jot down a few professional development goals you have for the year.
What do you want to learn more about?
What areas do you feel you have the least knowledge and experience in at this point?
This will significantly limit the amount of topics you have to search through and allow you to pinpoint continuing education and professional development that is unique for you.
Conduct a quick internet search
Do a quick search on the internet, through OT Facebook groups, or post on AOTAs CommunOT based on the topics you are focusing on.
The best bet is to ask trusted colleagues what ones they have enjoyed as they have first hand experience of the course. A simple question of, "what has been the most beneficial CEU for ______" can get you started.
*Be aware when asking on groups that there may be people that are affiliates or are promoting their own work. You can usually see this by connecting the person posting with the course speaker, but not always.
Know if a training or course is legit
A little while back, I wrote a blog on how to know a training or course is legit. I included some questions to ask or things to look for within the website or course description to help narrow down the credibility and identify any potential red flags.
Credible companies for Pediatric Continuing Education (CEUs) for multiple courses
Over the years, I have seen a few companies consistently produce relevant and quality courses. Here are a few of them that either I or someone I know has recommended.
These are companies (or events) that you can attend where you will be able to access multiple CEUs. No affiliate links are included.
AOTA Conferences
Speciality Conference: Child and Youth
Education Summit
Pediatric conferences outside of OT (school-based, psychology, physical therapy, ,etc.)
Credible one-off courses by topic
*These are courses that I have heard positive things about but cannot speak for all of them myself. No affiliate links are included.
Cognition
Physical Disabilities
School-Based
Calculating CEUs
Once you have completed the course, it is important to understand how many units it counted for and how many you have left before your license is up for renewal.
Here are a few examples to help:
If you take a 3 hour course, that counts as 3 contact hours. Then the contact hours are divided by 10 to get the CEU credit. For the 3 hour course, it would be 0.3 CEUs. If you need 24 contact hours total, or 2.4 CEUs, this would mean you would have 21 contact hours left (or 2.1 CEUs) before you meet your continuing education requirement.
Tracking CEUs
I used to put all my CEU certificates in multiple folders and not organize them very well. Then when it came close to my time to renew I had to scramble to find and put everything in one place to make sure I had enough continuing education credits.
Lately, I've learned from my mistakes and created an excel sheet continuing education tracker which I add to each time I have attended a course. This way it is all in one place and I can keep a running total of my CEU/contact hours.
Pro tip- scan and upload your certificates and have a link to them on Google drive within the Google Sheet.
Bringing information back to your staff
One final note I wanted to make sure was mentioned because sometimes this gets lost in the shuffle.
It is important to not only attend the course but to find ways to incorporate the lessons you learned back into practice and somewhat quickly.
Often times if you wait too long to do this, it is no longer fresh in your mind and harder to pull from.
Some ideas or examples I have done to help this process is to present at a staff meeting on the pediatric occupational therapy topic to my staff which helped me solidify my learning (my employer actually required it which I appreciated).
In addition, I usually try to have in mind about 1-2 kids during the courses who I felt would best benefit from the information/interventions/assessment. Then I would come up with some ideas for how to use the information in practice. If I had a chance, I would try to ask the instructor during breaks or at the end of the course about some ideas I had to see if that made sense or if they had other creative solutions based on the information being taught.
For example, when I went to a course about pediatric feeding disorders, I brainstormed some lateral food moves from their typical diet that a child I was working with might have more success with accepting and reviewed that list with the instructor. Reflection, although sometimes is annoying and takes more time, is key to incorporating our learning into OT practice.