How to Plan Continuing Education Around a Working Schedule

Why this matters

Continuing education almost never fails because the hours were hard to get. It fails because every hour got deferred to the last month of the cycle, and that month turned out to be busy, and a course seat that was available all year was not available in the four weeks that were left. The credential does not care that the hours existed. It expires.

The load itself is usually small. What is not small is the load when six people take it in the same fortnight, in season, with no room left to recover from a cancelled seat. Planning it is a capacity exercise before it is a compliance exercise, and doing that exercise once per cycle takes about an hour.

Step 1: Convert the requirement into shop person-hours

Look up what your authority requires per holder per cycle, and confirm both the hour count and the cycle length from the authority itself rather than from a provider's marketing. Then multiply out to a single shop-level number: holders times hours per holder equals person-hours per cycle.

That one number is what you are scheduling. Owners tend to think about continuing education one person at a time, which makes it feel trivial, and then discover at the end that the shop-level total was never on anybody's calendar.

While you are in the requirement, separate the hours into two piles, because they schedule completely differently:

• Divisible hours, typically self-paced or short modules, which can be taken in pieces whenever there is an hour available.
• Indivisible blocks, typically a full-day refresher, a hands-on session, or a proctored examination, which take a whole working day out of the field and cannot be split.

A plan that treats all hours as interchangeable will schedule a full-day course into an hour-long gap.

Step 2: Spread the divisible hours across the whole cycle

Divide the divisible hours per person by the number of quarters in the cycle and schedule that much, per person, per quarter, starting in the first quarter. Leaving the final quarter of the cycle empty on purpose is the whole trick: that emptiness is your recovery room when a seat gets cancelled or a person is out.

What breaks if you skip it: nothing, until it does. The shop that defers has exactly the same total hours as the shop that spreads, but it has converted a routine obligation into a single-point deadline with no slack in front of it.

Step 3: Put the indivisible blocks where the calendar is soft

Every trade has a season. Put full-day courses in the trough, and book them the cycle before you need them, because that is when seats are plentiful and your people are available at the same time.

The mistake here is subtler than "book early." It is booking the whole crew into the same slow week, which turns a soft week into a week with no coverage at all. Slow does not mean empty, and the calls that do come in during the trough are frequently the no-notice ones.

Step 4: Cap how much of the crew is out at once

State the cap as a rule with a unit and a Boolean so it does not get negotiated on a busy Monday:

No more than one field technician in six is out for education on any single working day, AND never two holders of the same single-coverage scope on the same day. The unit of analysis is the working day, shop-wide. When both conditions cannot be satisfied inside a given week, the step change is to split the week across two weeks rather than to raise the cap.

The second condition is the one people forget. A shop with two people certified for a scope can afford to have one out. Sending both to the same course on the same day means that scope is uncovered for a full day, which is the same operational effect as one of them being lapsed, minus the paperwork.

Step 5: Protect the hours the way you protect a job

A booked education block goes on the dispatch board as an unavailable block with a name, not as a note in somebody's phone. If it is invisible to whoever assigns work, it will be assigned over, and the person will miss the seat.

Two supports make this hold. Confirm attendance with the provider the week before, because a course that fails to reach minimum enrolment gets cancelled quietly and the notice goes to whoever registered rather than to your dispatcher. And record the completion against the credential register row on the day it happens, with the certificate attached, rather than at renewal time when nobody can find it.

Step 6: Pay for it correctly, and say so before anyone signs up

Under the federal training-time rule at 29 CFR 785.27, time spent in training counts as hours worked unless all four of these are true at once: attendance is outside normal working hours, attendance is genuinely voluntary, the course is not directly related to the employee's job, and the employee performs no productive work during it. Continuing education that you require for a credential the job depends on will fail at least the voluntary and job-related conditions in nearly every case, so budget it as paid time and say so when you announce the plan.

Getting this backwards produces two problems, and the wage exposure is only the smaller one. The larger one is that a technician who believes education is unpaid personal time defers it to the last possible week, which is exactly the behaviour the whole plan exists to prevent.

Worked example: six technicians, one cycle, two schedules

Six field technicians. Suppose the requirement works out to 12 hours per holder per cycle and the cycle runs two years, so eight quarters. Use your own authority's numbers; these are illustrative and are here to show the arithmetic, not to be copied.

Shop total: 6 holders times 12 hours equals 72 person-hours per cycle. Splitting the requirement, 6 of each person's 12 hours are an indivisible full-day refresher and 6 are divisible modules.

To size the impact, take the shop's field capacity. Say each technician averages 30 billable hours a week; again, use your own figure. Six technicians at 30 hours across about 4.3 weeks gives roughly 774 billable hours in a month, and about 2,322 in a quarter. Note what these hours are: field capacity available to sell. The education hours are paid non-billable time, so the comparison below is capacity displaced, not margin lost, and the two are not the same currency.

Schedule A, deferred. All 72 person-hours land in the final month of the cycle. That is about 9 percent of one month's field capacity, taken in the month with the least room to give it, and with no recovery time behind it. If a single full-day seat is cancelled in that month, that holder's credential lapses.

Schedule B, split. The 36 indivisible hours (six technicians, one day each) are booked into a slow-season month, staggered under the Step 4 cap at one technician per working day, so they occupy six working days. That is about 5 percent of that month's field capacity, and it lands in the month where the shop is not selling all of its capacity anyway. The 36 divisible hours are scheduled as one hour per technician in each of six quarters, six hours shop-wide per quarter, which is about 0.3 percent of a quarter's field capacity. The last two quarters of the cycle are left empty on purpose.

Now run Schedule B against the Step 4 rule rather than assuming it complies. One technician per day satisfies the first condition across all six days. The second condition needs checking: two of the six hold the shop's specialty scope, and in the first draft of the calendar they were on consecutive days, day 3 and day 4, which passes the rule as written since it governs a single day rather than a pair. They were still separated to day 1 and day 4, because a same-week absence of both holders of a single-coverage scope is a coverage risk the rule does not catch. Worth being explicit that this was a judgement layered on top of the rule, not the rule producing it.

The two schedules cost the same total hours. What separates them is where the hours land and how much room sits behind the last one: Schedule B's final indivisible block completes with two full quarters of margin, Schedule A's completes with days.

How to verify the plan is working mid-cycle

Do not wait for the cycle to end to find out.

The halfway count. At the midpoint of the cycle, each holder should have roughly half their divisible hours logged and their indivisible block either done or booked with a confirmation. A holder at zero at the midpoint is not behind by half, they are behind by the whole thing, because the remaining half of the cycle now has to carry a full load plus recovery room.

The certificate test. For every hour anyone claims, there should be a certificate attached to that person's register row. Hours that exist only in someone's recollection do not exist. This test regularly finds hours taken with a provider whose courses the authority does not accept, which is a different problem and a worse one. See related: How to Choose a Continuing Education Provider.

The empty-quarter test. Look at the last two quarters of the cycle on the calendar. If anything is booked there, something slipped earlier and the recovery room has already been spent.

References

• U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, 29 CFR 785.27, which treats training attendance as hours worked unless all four stated conditions are met at once, and which employer-required credential education generally fails
• Your state or local licensing authority, for the hour count, the cycle length, and which of your hours must come from specified subject areas rather than general credit
• See related: How Continuing Education Requirements Are Usually Structured; How to Choose a Continuing Education Provider; The Lead Times That Decide Whether a Renewal Is Calm; Continuing Education That Pays Off