For a moment I thought I heard crickets chirping!

As with all professions, home inspectors must keep up with all of the changes and refresh themselves on the basics.  Did you know that not all home inspectors have CE requirements?  Most of the licensed states (34 states license home inspectors right now,) do have annual/biannual CE requirements for inspectors who hold a license.

The major home inspector professional associations place annual CE requirements on their members. CE hours are not all that difficult to obtain if the person wants to learn.  The hard part is obtaining what I would call quality CE.  It has become easy to obtain CE from several online sources, but many of those sessions are designed just to meet the hour requirement with little effort given to the quality of the material that is being presented.  I have found that if you get your CE hours throughout the year a little at a time that you will end up many times with twice of what you really need.

Lately we have seen a major influx of online CE sessions by a home inspector association. Some are good and some are bad and some have little to do with home inspections!  Yet, they are being approved by several states (including Tennessee, my home state) for the required CE hours.   Today I discovered that the majority of the online CE sessions are not even viewed by the folks at the state after they approve the first one.  They just rubber stamp the rest  of the submitted courses after the first one is approved.  Now, if the state gets a complaint on an online session, then they will investigate that course and pull it if needed.  Who is going to complain when they are being given free CE hours! Pretty sad way of approving CE is you ask me.  I wonder how common of a practice this is in other states.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against online education.  I would just like to see the online courses go through a little more rigours approval process.