Frikk Nesje and Stefan Voigt
Abstract
Continuing and Professional Education in Economics and Finance
We developed and offered two Continuing and Professional Education (CPE) courses within the Department of Economics, in collaboration with colleagues. Given that CPE is a strategic focus area at the Faculty of Social Sciences, our project output is to deliver a roadmap for future developers of such a course format. We hope our experiences help to identify best practices for the implementation and successful rollout of such a course. Our project has two objectives. The primary objective is to collect best practices on how to plan such a course. Main takeaways are: the preparation time for professional courses is way higher than for a course that is taught within the university curriculum. Client needs require tailor-made program development. The effort to sell the course by communicating with essential stakeholders is substantial. The secondary objective is to gather experience on teaching the target group – professional economists – to increase the quality of future courses. We find that particularly the heterogeneity among Participants knowledge requires careful adjustment of the workshop design.