Online CPE Courses Go for Less
Everyone has heard of online CPE courses for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and the like, but how about for personal trainers? No joke: even health club workers are now expected to maintain a certain level of knowledge about developments in the field!
That’s right; those guys and gals whose job it is to get their clients in shape. Yes, them. That is, if industry movers and shakers such as the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) or the American Council on Exercise (ACE) will have anything to do with it. The “CPE” in the term “online CPE courses” means “continuing professional education.” Of course, gym workers aren’t often thought of as “professionals” by most people, much less the kind of professionals that need to be recertified periodically. Isn’t that so?
Not according to the likes of the ACSM or ACE. Due to the fast pace of new discoveries in the field of human health and fitness, the industry wants to make things a lot more professional, more academically rigorous, more upscale and high-value. But such efforts may have hit a plateau. ACSM pioneered the idea of certifying fitness workers back in the 1950s, but even today not much of an industry standard exists – such that most online CPE courses for trainers, coaches, and other industry job titles remain the monopoly of the organization certifying them in the first place.
In fact, certification is only meaningful for insurance purposes. For no matter how hard the gyms and certifcation-peddlers might try, most people rightly regard trainers as not on the same level as doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Turnover is high while the quality of trainers, despite certification, is often low; many franchise gyms hire teenagers – kids – to advise clients paying eighty dollars and up an hour (of which only twenty to forty go to the trainer).For one thing, many chain gyms have college kids working as personal trainers: hard to see a doctor, lawyer, or accountant regarding such workers as fellow “professionals!”

