It’s always nice when our audience responds to our desperate plea to submit heart-wrenching letters looking for advice. Here is what rose to the top of the old Ask Us Anything mailbag this month.
REMINDER: If you have an issue (professional or personal) you want us to help with, you can click here to submit your question(s).
Dear Derek and Scott,
Besides CMEpalooza, what key resources would you recommend to help newcomers get oriented in the CE/CME/CPD industry?
Signed,
CE-nior Citizen
SCOTT: So I know that you said “besides CMEpalooza,” but let me first point you to a few archived sessions from our past that may be helpful to you:
- CME 101 (2018)
- CME Overview for the CME Professional (2019)
- The CME Dictionary (2020)
- Reaffirming Our Relevance: Myths and Misconceptions about CME and Implications for Our Industry (2023)
If that’s not enough for you, there are other options, some of which are also free and/or low cost.
The Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEHP) website offers a series of Cornerstone Modules that seem to provide a high-level overview of various key industry domains such as accreditation, program management, and adult learning theory. I have not personally watched any of these, so I cannot vouch for their quality. They are free for members, but cost $79 each for non-members. I am told they will all be updated in the near future; it’s unclear when the current modules were recorded, though they appear to be a few years old.
You can also find a variety of online webinars on the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) website. These can be a bit pricey, and again, I have not watched or heard any feedback on the quality of these, so proceed at your own risk.
If you have the funds and interest in attending a live event, the ACCME is holding their annual Accreditation Workshop in late August. The ACEHP typically hosts a pre-conference day for CME newbies around their annual conference, though details for 2026 are not yet available on their website. There are other industry events as well that may be appropriate for CME newbies but since I don’t want to mistakenly exclude anyone, I’ll just leave this list short.
Beyond formal educational opportunities like these, there are often regional chapter events (either live or online) that can be useful. Building a small professional network can be helpful if you have specific questions you need answered.
DEREK: Of course, Scott goes first and takes all the easy examples. Thanks for nothing, though I can’t get too upset with him after his stellar self-promotion of CMEpalooza to lead off his response.
I do have a couple additional resources for newcomers to consider:
- The Alliance Mentorship Program: It’s always nice to have a shoulder to lean on when facing a new challenge, so the Alliance Mentorship Program might be a good option for you. NOTE: Don’t let the fact that I was a mentor last year concern you about the quality of the program. I’m sure it was just due to some sort of administrative error.
- The CE Educator’s Toolkit: From the website: “The CE Educator’s Toolkit is a resource designed to equip educators with best practices and guidelines to deliver effective continuing education (CE). The toolkit was developed by the Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME) through an ACCME research grant in fulfillment of ACCME’s strategic goal to advocate for research and scholarship in continuing education.” And it’s free!
- LinkedIn: For me, LinkedIn now is what Twitter was 10-15 years ago: the social network I go to for my own professional development. There is a thriving CE/CME community and a vast network of resources being shared on a regular basis. It is well worth taking a few minutes of your time to connect with others in the community and read through your LinkedIn feed every so often. You might be surprised by what you learn.
Dear Scott and Derek,
My coworker thinks they are the smartest person in the room. How do I politely get them to accept my advice when I tell them they stink at communicating?
Yup,
Word Up
DEREK: This is an easy one. Just add the quote, “The smartest person in the room is never as smart as all the people in the room” to your email signature (make sure you italicize, bold, and color the text) every time you email your colleague, and they will quickly get the point. They might even start referring to you as the “Email Philosopher” and seeking you out directly for advice. Be careful what you wish for!
Another tip — and one that is perhaps a tad more serious — that I have found helpful when working with people who think they are the smartest person in the room but stink at communicating is to be a direct and blunt with them as possible. This is not really my preferred method of communicating, but it’s a style I’ve developed out of frustration when my normal, polite passive-aggressive mode has proved ineffective. Some people just need to be told directly to their face that what they are doing is annoying wrong, embarrassing, etc. It’s not that they don’t believe you when you tell them politely, but they are testing to see how strongly you believe what you are saying. They want to see how far they can push before you will back down. It took me quite a while to learn this.
SCOTT: These sorts of personality conflicts are one of the reasons I am quite glad that I don’t have to deal with office politics anymore. Who is upset/frustrated with who? Who is trying to get someone else fired? Whose mother isn’t really in the hospital with a serious illness but was instead seen lying on the beach on a day they “just couldn’t make it in”? No thank you.
While these days I only work with a small circle of people on a professional basis, I had plenty of run-ins with those who tried to assert their intellectual dominance earlier in my career (and yes, sometimes I was probably this person – my emotional intelligence took time to develop). Usually, this person would botch something badly and try to blame the issue on someone else, make the wrong person angry with their attitude (ie, their boss), and the situation would eventually correct itself with a pink slip. But in the meantime, I feel your pain, Word Up. While it’s great to surround yourself with smart people professionally, it’s always best when those people don’t flaunt their brilliance in your face and try to make you feel “lesser than.”
CMEPALOOZA 