Continued Competency – How does the PA board’s requirements differ from NBCOT’s PDUs?

NBCOT requires continuing education (counted as professional development units or PDUs) rather than continued competence. It is the PA licensure board’s opinion that continued competence requires engagement in the profession. In order to ensure engagement, there were a few areas where the Board did not incorporate the PDUs from NBCOT:

• (a) activities wherein documentation supporting completion of the activity was not independently verifiable (NBCOT PDU 9 and 12)
• (b) pre-preparation activities (NBCOT PDUs 1 and 2)
• (c) activities stemming from an employment role (NBCOT PDUs 17 and 28), and
• (d) collection of data credit (NBCOT PDU 27).

For Pennsylvania, acceptable continued competency activities are broken into 7 categories of activities.  With several exceptions and breakdown differences, these categories are similar to the NBCOT’s 28 professional development units (PDUs).  Watch this blog for a review of the acceptable activities, or you can check them out for yourself.