Educational Therapy Continuing Education: What Actually Counts
- Andrea Chernin
- Aug 11
- 21 min read
If you hold two credentials, you are running two compliance clocks — and they do not tick in the same units.
That is the honest headline on educational therapy continuing education, and it is worth saying before anything else, because it is the thing that catches practitioners out. You go to a good conference, you sit through eleven hours of solid instruction, and you assume you have discharged the year.
Then renewal comes round and one body wants five of those hours to have carried its own logo, another wants them expressed as a decimal, and a third does not count conference attendance toward the part of its requirement you were short on.
Nobody is being obstructive. The bodies were built at different times for different purposes and none of them publishes reciprocity with any of the others. But the effect on a working practitioner is real, and the fix is not more hours. It is knowing, before you register for anything, which requirement each hour is going to satisfy.
This is a map of what the issuing bodies actually publish, taken from their own pages and quoted where the wording matters. Every requirement below is attributed and linked. Where a body's published record runs out — and it does, more often than you would expect — this says so rather than filling the gap.
The word "CEU" means three different things
Start here, because almost every downstream confusion traces back to it.
The International Association for Continuing Education and Training publishes the standard definition, and it is the one most people think is universal. From IACET's own page on the CEU: "One (1) CEU is equivalent to ten (10) contact hours of participation in an organized learning experience delivered under responsible sponsorship, capable direction, and qualified instruction." IACET restates it in plainer terms in its own explainer — ten contact hours, one CEU.
So a full-day workshop is roughly 0.6 CEUs. Not six.
A CEU is not a unit of time. It is a unit of ten units of time — except at the bodies where it isn't.
Now hold that next to the Council for Exceptional Children, which issues CEUs to special educators. From CEC's professional development hours page: "One CEC CEU represents one clock hour in a planned continuing education experience that is relevant to the profession or discipline of special education."
One clock hour. Not ten. CEC's CEU is a tenth of IACET's, and CEC does not flag the divergence.
Where this bites in practice
The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators uses the IACET convention and states it explicitly on its continuing education page: "Each contact hour earns .10 or 1/10 of a CEU. One CEU represents 10 contact hours." Its annual requirement is therefore "10 contact hours, one CEU credit" — ten hours of your time, expressed as a single CEU.
If you saw "one CEU" and budgeted an afternoon, you were off by a factor of ten in the wrong direction. If you saw AOGPE's requirement described secondhand as "10 CEUs," you were off by a factor of ten in the other direction, and you would have booked a hundred hours.
The Center for Effective Reading Instruction manages to use the word in both senses inside a single document. Its maintenance page says holders "have completed 10 hours of KPS-Aligned Continuing Education Units (CEU) annually" — which, read against IACET, would be a hundred hours.
Elsewhere on the same page it states the internally consistent version: "one-year Certification Renewals require 10 or more hours or 1.0 CEU" and "three-year Certification Renewals require 30 or more hours or 3.0 CEUs at time of renewal."
Quote the second one. It is the sentence that means what CERI means.
And AET refuses the unit entirely — then uses it
The Association of Educational Therapists insists on hours. Its membership levels page specifies ten hours annually and takes the trouble to say *not units*.
Then AET's own webinars page lists sessions valued in CEUs — individual events carrying values like 0.15 CEUs, with ASHA conditions attached. A member who attends a ninety-minute AET webinar earns 0.15 CEUs by the listing and needs to log 1.5 hours by the policy, and AET publishes no conversion rule between the two.
It is not a large problem. It is a genuine one, and it is entirely AET's to fix.
AET: ten hours a year, five of them AET's
This is the requirement most readers of this site are actually governed by, so it gets the most detail.
From AET's CE Yearly Requirements page, verbatim: "Ten hours of CE annually is required. A minimum of five hours must be earned through attendance at AET-sponsored professional development events or activities."
And: "Completion of an AET Ethics Workshop (three hours of CE) is required every three years."
It does not apply to every member
Worth checking which line you are on. The requirement is scoped to members at the Associate ET, ET/P® and BCET® levels. AET states no CE requirement for its Student, Allied Professional, General or Retired classes. If you are an Allied Professional — a licensed psychologist, SLP or OT holding AET membership alongside your own licensure — your CE obligation runs through your licensing board, not through AET.
If you are working up the ladder, the CE clock starts at Associate. That is worth knowing early, and it is one of the things the route into the profession tends not to spell out, and one of the things AET's own career overview and fact sheet leave to the membership policy.
The four Areas, and the one nobody expects
AET names four qualifying Areas:
Area 1 — attendance at a minimum of five hours of AET-sponsored events: conferences, workshops, webinars (live, virtual or on demand), Learning Community meetings, and journal or book discussion groups.
Area 2 — the Ethics Workshop, three hours, every three years.
Area 3 — supervision of an associate member working toward ET/P®, or of a student member in an AET-approved program.
Area 4 — a non-AET event, which "must enhance the member's knowledge of content relevant to the practice of educational therapy."
Area 3 is the one worth reading twice. If you supervise, that supervision counts as your own continuing education. Practitioners who have been supervising for years and separately buying CE hours have been paying twice for something the policy already credits.
The documentation standard is unusually relaxed
AET accepts, among other things, "Notes recorded by the attendee, a summary, or a statement of implementation." No certificate required, no provider number, no transcript. Write up what you learned and how you are using it.
That is a low bar and you should still clear it deliberately, because of what comes next.
Two separate thirty-day clocks
This is the detail secondary writing routinely garbles, so here is AET's own sequencing. "Members chosen for audit will be notified 30 days following their membership renewal date (or sooner)." Then: "The deadline for submitting requested documentation is 30 days following the date of audit notification."
Two clocks, not one. Thirty days after renewal you may be notified; thirty days after *that* notification your documentation is due. Members reconstruct a year of attendance inside a month more often than they should have to.
What non-compliance actually costs
Nothing is revoked. From the same page: "An individual's membership level will convert to General Membership until compliance with CE requirements is established."
A reversible downgrade, not a termination. You lose the designation and the standing that goes with it, and you get them back when you are compliant. That is a materially gentler consequence than most practitioners assume, and it is worth knowing accurately — anxiety about credential loss is not a good reason to book training you do not need.
AET's Code of Ethics carries the principle behind the policy at Section One, III.B, and it is qualitative, not numeric: members "systematically advance their knowledge and skills by pursuing a program of continuing education including but not limited to participation in such activities as professional conferences/workshops, professional meetings, continuing education courses, and the reading of professional literature." The numbers live only in the membership policy. The obligation lives in the ethics code.
The 2026 conference
AET's conference page lists 6–8 November 2026, with registration open, and a pre-conference Ethics Panel listed for 23 October 2026. No location, format or total CE-hour figure is published on that page, so do not plan travel on the assumption it is in person until AET says so.
Note also that AET's conference home page still displays 2025 sponsors — the two pages disagree about which conference is current, and the numbered page is the one carrying 2026 dates.
The structured literacy credentials
Four bodies here, four different shapes. If you hold a structured literacy credential alongside AET membership, this section and the last one are your two clocks.
ALTA — and a caveat about sourcing
The Academic Language Therapy Association renews on ten approved CE hours a year, at least five of which must come from ALTA National or Chapter events, per its certification FAQ. That applies to holders of both its levels — the Certified Academic Language Practitioner and the Certified Academic Language Therapist, whose binding requirements live on the members portal rather than the marketing site.
A sourcing caveat, stated plainly: `altaread.org` is a JavaScript application whose served HTML contains no readable text, and the figures above could not be re-verified from the live page during the preparation of this article.
They are consistent with what ALTA has published previously and with the structure of its approved books list, but if your renewal turns on the exact number, load the page in a browser or email ALTA rather than relying on this or any other secondhand write-up.
ALTA's CE policies page is behind a member login, which is also why carry-forward and audit rules for ALTA are not stated anywhere in this article — they are not publicly readable.
That is not a criticism of ALTA. It is a description of what a practitioner can and cannot confirm before paying for training, and you should know which of the numbers in front of you are load-bearing.
One published detail that is confirmable: presenters earn at a premium. ALTA's guidelines for CE providers credit presenters "2 continuing education hours per clock hour."
AOGPE — ten contact hours, no carry-forward, and books count
From the Academy's CEU requirements page: "10 contact hours, one CEU credit, is required annually," and the page states the requirement applies at the Associate, Certified and Fellow levels. Subscriber members, who are not certified members but "informed consumers," are outside it. Retired members no longer working with students are exempt.
Two features distinguish AOGPE from every other body here.
Nothing has to come from the Academy. No must-come-from-us fraction is published. The page explicitly accepts "webinars, workshops, or lectures given in any venue (for example at an IDA conference)." A Fellow lecturing at an International Dyslexia Association event is credited in full. Against AET's fifty-percent captive requirement and ALTA's, that is a real difference in what your year has to look like.
And the reading conversions are generous. Books from the OGA Reading List "each earn one CEU" — that is, ten contact hours, discharging the entire annual requirement with a single book. Read carefully in CEU terms rather than hour terms here, because the difference is a factor of ten.
The constraint on the other side: "Contact hours do not carry forward to subsequent years." A heavy conference year buys you nothing in the next one. Documentation is held rather than filed — members "maintain documentation for a minimum of five years" and submit it "only in the event of an audit." No audit percentage is published.
Wilson — and the distinction almost everyone gets wrong
Wilson Language Training separates two objects that most practitioners treat as one, and the sentence that separates them is on its own page: "Although your Wilson Professional Credential must be renewed every five years, WRS Level I and Level II Certifications are recognized from their issue date and do not expire."
Your certification — Level I or Level II — is permanent. Your credential — the W.D.P. or W.D.T. after your name — is the thing on a five-year clock.
And here is the consequence, which is much less alarming than the rumour: "There are no changes to your status of WRS Certification if you do not renew your Wilson Professional Credential. You will still be considered WRS Certified." You lose the designation and the directory listing. You do not lose the training or the certification behind it.
The requirement itself is the most precisely published in this whole landscape: "a total of 50 WPLC (Wilson Professional Learning Credits) within the five-year period (1 hour = 1 WPLC)." One hour, one credit, no conversion arithmetic at all. Category caps run: Wilson's own professional learning up to 50 hours with a minimum of 20 required; Recognized Providers up to 20 hours; self-reported up to 10 hours.
So Wilson's captive fraction is 40 percent, against AET's and ALTA's 50, and CERI's and AOGPE's zero.
Rollover: "Credits from one renewal period cannot be rolled into the next renewal period." And Wilson is the only body here that publishes an audit rate: "Wilson Reading System® (WRS) will audit 5% of all Wilson® Dyslexia Practitioners (W.D.P.) and Wilson® Dyslexia Therapists (W.D.T.) during each five-year renewal period."
Details worth knowing: the credit tracker locks at expiry, there is a ninety-day window to process a renewal, and documentation should be kept five years. Wilson's certification pages also state that IDA recognises both Level I and Level II as Accreditation Plus programs.
Wilson's Recognized Providers list is the closest thing to reciprocity in the field
This is the single most useful cross-body artefact published anywhere, and it is buried in a category cap.
Wilson's Recognized Providers list names AOGPE, IMSLEC, ALTA, the International Dyslexia Association and its branches, The Reading League, Learning Ally and Everyone Reading, alongside Wilson's own accredited training partners and several regional organisations.
So the bodies do cross-recognise each other's professional development, even though not one of them publishes reciprocity of *requirements*. An IDA branch conference counts toward Wilson's twenty non-Wilson hours, toward AOGPE's ten contact hours in full, toward CERI's ten if the content maps to the Knowledge and Practice Standards, and toward AET's Area 4 — but not toward AET's five-hour AET-sponsored minimum.
That last clause is the whole game. One event, four credits, one gap.
CERI — ten hours a year, from anyone
CERI is the clean counter-example to ALTA, and the contrast is instructive. Its maintenance page accepts "any continuing education training, conference, event, university course, webinar, or other learning opportunity whose subject matter adequately covers at least one of the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (KPS)."
Zero percent has to come from CERI — and CERI could not impose a captive fraction if it wanted to, because per its FAQ "CERI does not offer training or courses themselves." A certifying body that runs no training has no incentive to make you buy its training. Whether that is principle or structure, the effect on your calendar is the same.
The subject-matter test is the constraint instead. Content has to map to at least one KPS standard, which means a general classroom-management day may not qualify where a decoding-focused one plainly does.
Lapse is graduated rather than sudden: "When your CERI certification expires, your profile in the Provider Directory is automatically delisted following a thirty (30) day grace period."
Two gaps in CERI's published record, stated because they matter: the word "audit" does not appear on CERI's maintenance, renewal or FAQ pages at all, and no carry-forward rule is published. Do not assume either exists, and do not assume it doesn't. CERI's site footer also carries an outdated copyright range and at least one broken navigation link, so treat detail there as possibly stale and confirm anything load-bearing directly.
Note also that CERI's certification levels changed name — the Certified Dyslexia Practitioner and Certified Dyslexia Therapist are now the Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist and Structured Literacy Dyslexia Specialist, alongside the Structured Literacy Classroom Teacher Knowledge Certificate — and that since April 2026 the KPEERI application process runs through IDA rather than CERI. Both changes are covered in more depth in the survey of what learning specialist certification actually is.
The coaching credentials
Different world, same problem. If you coach executive function alongside an educational therapy practice, you are likely holding one of these too.
ICF — 40 credits over three years, and a carve-out people miss
The International Coaching Federation requires, per its renewal page, "At least 40 Continuing Coach Education (CCE) credits completed in the three years since the initial award of your credential or since your last renewal." That figure is identical for ACC, PCC and MCC — credential levels that differ enormously in what it took to earn them and not at all in what it takes to keep them.
Within the 40: "At least 24 CCE credits must be in Core Competencies." The remaining 16 may be Resource Development or further Core Competencies, which makes 16 a ceiling on Resource Development rather than a floor.
And the detail that trips people: "At least three Core Competency credits must be in coaching ethics." Those three are carved out of the 24, not added on top. Forty total, twenty-four competency, three of the twenty-four ethics.
Mentor coaching is mandatory for ACC holders only — ten hours with an eligible mentor coach over a minimum of three months. For PCC and MCC it is optional but creditable: up to ten hours of mentor coaching, given or received, may count toward the 40.
Most secondary summaries flatten this into "mentor coaching is required," which is wrong for two of the three levels. Only ICF's renewal candidate guide resolves it cleanly.
Education from non-ICF-accredited providers does count. ICF requires supplemental documentation demonstrating alignment with its Core Competencies for those courses — so keep syllabi, not just certificates. And note that self-study reading or research "may only count toward Resource Development credits," which caps how much of your 40 it can ever be.
ICF allows a two-month grace period and twelve months to full expiry.
PAAC — 24 CEUs, and a cycle length the organisation cannot agree on
The Professional Association for ADHD Coaches states: "Every two calendar years, a PAAC Credentialed Coach must complete and submit 24 CEUs." The split is ADHD Knowledge and ADHD Coaching, minimum 15 credits; Additional Coach Skills, up to 8; Ethical Standards, 1 required.
Nothing has to come from PAAC — except that the ethics credit is restricted to four named pre-approved courses, and three of the four are external: PAAC's own ethics course, MentorCoach's Safe Passage, ADDCA's Ethics of ADHD Coaching, and ICF's coaching ethics course. An ICF holder can therefore satisfy PAAC's ethics requirement with a course they may already have taken.
A contradiction, still live on PAAC's site as of August 2026: its FAQ page says a PAAC credential "needs to be renewed every three years," while the CEU requirements page says every two calendar years. The same CEU page also refers in passing to "the annual CEU process." Three different cadences across two pages. Do not treat any of them as settled — ask PAAC in writing and keep the reply.
BCC — 70 clock hours over five years, from anyone
The Board Certified Coach credential, administered by the Center for Credentialing & Education, publishes the most permissive provider policy of the lot in its CE requirements document: "70 clock hours of continuing education (CE) every 5 years to retain your certification," of which "Four clock hours must deal with ethics in coaching," and "You may participate in CE activities from any qualified provider, not just those listed at" its own opportunities page.
Specialty designations stack: "BCCs with an optional specialty designation must accumulate at least 10 clock hours in each specialty that they hold."
Seventy hours over five years is fourteen a year — the heaviest annual load in this article — but with no captive fraction at all, and it is a general coaching credential rather than an executive-function one.
Executive function coaching specifically: read the governance before the requirement
If you have been looking for an EF-specific board, the National Board of Executive Function Certification requires "40 hours (4 CEU) of professional development every two years" to maintain board certification. Note the unit again — 40 hours expressed as 4 CEUs is the IACET convention, correctly applied.
The requirement is unremarkable. The governance is what a prospective applicant should read first. From NBEFC's governance page: "The Board is overseen by the Founder and Board Chair, who holds final authority over certification standards, ethical policies, examination requirements, credentialing criteria, and enforcement actions." Advisory board members "contribute perspective, research-informed insight, and professional guidance but do not participate in formal governance or credentialing decisions."
And no external accreditation is claimed anywhere on the site — not by the NCCA, not by ANSI or ANAB, not by ICE. The "third-party" language on the site refers to exam proctoring.
The plain finding, and it is worth stating rather than implying: as of August 2026 there is no independently accredited body certifying executive function coaches.
Coaches who want external accountability behind their credential are using ICF, BCC or PAAC, none of which is EF-specific. That is a gap in the field, not a criticism of any one organisation, and it is part of why the boundaries between these three roles are still contested.
The outliers
Three bodies that do not fit the hours-and-cycles pattern at all.
NILD renews on activities, not hours — including a conference
NILD is the only body here whose renewal is a checklist rather than an hours attestation, and the only one that makes conference attendance itself a standing condition.
From NILD's renewals page, Standard Licensure requires: minimum NILD Level I training; conference attendance within the past year; 100 contact student hours; and 2 NILD or related webinars in the past year.
PCET renewal raises the caseload bar — "200 student hours or be a Program Director" — plus one item from a list that includes an NILD course or workshop, three CEUs from education-related classes or workshops, three graduate credits, FIE training, two webinars, or presenting at a conference.
The framing deserves a note. NILD's own pages describe a licence — "Get Licensed to Practice NILD Educational Therapy" — and its Level II course FAQ describes NILD as "a professional training and licensing organization."
That is a private organisation's proprietary method licence, not a government licence, and NILD nowhere claims state authority. The conflation risk sits with the reader. Enforcement is real within its own scope: without a current licence you may not practise NILD Educational Therapy or use NILD materials.
NASET publishes a renewal product and almost no renewal policy
NASET markets renewal for its board certifications, and its renewals page reduces the whole thing to one course: "Take the Culturally Responsive Classroom Management (CRCM) Course and Renew Your Certification from NASET."
Renewal interval, CE hour count, lapse consequences and audit process are unpublished across the certification overview, the BCSE course page and the renewals page alike. The official handbook contains no renewal or CE section.
For an article comparing rigour, that absence is the finding. Every other body on this page publishes a cycle length. Draw your own conclusion, but draw it from the published record rather than from anyone's characterisation of it.
ICLCA renews by application, with no CE requirement at all
The International College Learning Center Association's Learning Center Leadership Certification states that "Initial certification is valid for two full years" while "all renewal certifications are valid for five full years," and Level 4 is lifetime.
No continuing education requirement is stated. Renewal is by application and peer review rather than by evidencing hours — a review committee of at least two currently certified ICLCA members reads applications. It is the one credential in this landscape that is explicitly individual and explicitly portable between institutions.
A correction to something this site published previously, and to a claim that circulates more widely: the phrase "learning specialist" does not appear in ICLCA's published qualifications for this certification. The page speaks of "learning center professionals" and "learning assistance professionals" and states that "All qualified professionals are encouraged to apply."
The per-level eligibility criteria live in linked application documents that are not publicly readable. If you have seen ICLCA described as certifying learning specialists by name — including in an earlier version of our own learning specialist certification coverage — that description is not supported by what ICLCA publishes, and we have corrected it.
The bodies with no CE requirement at all, because they credential nobody
Worth naming, because practitioners regularly assume otherwise and go looking for a renewal cycle that does not exist.
IMSLEC accredits training courses. It does not certify individuals, and says so: "While IMSLEC does not certify individuals, many of IMSLEC's accredited members offer certification."
IDA does not certify individuals either. Its certification page says credentials "are offered through organizations such as the Center for Effective Reading Instruction (CERI) and other recognized certifying bodies." What IDA does directly is accredit educator preparation programs and administer the KPEERI exam. IDA's role in this article is as a *supplier* of CE to other bodies' cycles, which is verifiable from Wilson's, CERI's and AOGPE's own pages.
CRLA certifies programs, and puts the point in one sentence: "ITTPC certifies tutor training programs and authorizes tutor training programs to recognize tutors who have met their institution's CRLA ITTPC tutor training program requirements. We do not certify tutors or tutor-trainers."
AHEAD certifies nobody. It publishes Professional Competencies — nine of them, in what AHEAD calls the second version — as a framework, not a credential. There is no AHEAD sentence disclaiming certification; the finding is the complete absence of any certification programme across its site.
If you hold nothing but a course completion from an accredited programme, there is no renewal clock on you. There may also be no credential behind your title, which is a separate question and the subject of its own article.
Two credentials, two clocks: a worked example
Take a practitioner holding AET ET/P® membership and a Wilson W.D.T. credential. Both are common; together they are ordinary.
AET wants ten hours this year, five of them AET-sponsored, plus a three-hour AET Ethics Workshop once every three years.
Wilson wants 50 WPLC across five years — ten a year if you spread it evenly — with at least 20 of the 50 from Wilson itself, and none of it carrying forward past the renewal date.
Now run one year against both.
Attend the AET conference. Those hours discharge AET's five-hour captive minimum and count toward AET's ten. Against Wilson, they land in the Recognized Providers or self-reported buckets — capped at 20 and 10 hours respectively across the whole five years — and not against Wilson's 20-hour Wilson-sourced minimum.
Take a Wilson course. Those hours count fully toward Wilson's 20-hour minimum. Against AET they fall under Area 4 — a non-AET event enhancing knowledge relevant to educational therapy — so they count toward AET's ten but cannot touch AET's five-hour AET-sponsored floor.
Attend a CEC event. It counts under CEC's own CEU scheme at one CEU per clock hour, and under AET's Area 4. Same limitation: it will not satisfy AET's captive five. And CEC says so itself, explicitly disclaiming portability: "You should always check in advance with your state's Department of Education or certifying body to be sure CEC CEUs are accepted for licensure or recertification."
The pattern is now visible. Captive minimums do not overlap. Every body that imposes one has carved out a portion of your year that nothing else can fill, and the portions do not stack. AET's five and Wilson's twenty are two separate obligations that no single event satisfies.
Everything above the captive minimum, though, is broadly fungible — one well-chosen structured literacy conference can count against AET's Area 4, AOGPE's ten contact hours, CERI's ten KPS-aligned hours and Wilson's non-Wilson allowance simultaneously.
Plan the captive hours first. Everything else takes care of itself.
How to build a CE year that clears more than one bar
Not advice about which training to take — that is your professional judgement and it depends on your caseload. This is only about sequencing, and it follows from the structure above.
List your captive minimums before anything else. AET's five AET-sponsored hours. Wilson's 20-of-50. ALTA's five-of-ten. These are the hours that only one specific provider can supply, and they are the ones that go wrong.
Book those first, at the start of the cycle, not the end. They are also the ones with the fewest available dates.
Check the ethics carve-outs separately. AET's three-hour Ethics Workshop every three years. ICF's three ethics credits inside the 24. BCC's four ethics hours in seventy. PAAC's single ethics CEU, restricted to four named courses. Each is a small requirement that is easy to reach renewal without having met.
Then fill the remainder with the thing you actually want to learn. The open-provider bodies — CERI, AOGPE, BCC, and PAAC outside its ethics credit — will accept it if the subject matter fits.
Log as you go, in whatever form the strictest body accepts. AET's standard is unusually relaxed; Wilson's five-year retention with a 5% audit rate is not. Keep what the stricter one wants.
Diary the cycle boundaries. AOGPE and Wilson both refuse carry-forward. Hours earned in the wrong year are hours donated.
If you are early in practice and building this scaffolding for the first time alongside everything else, the operational side of setting up is where the CE budget and the renewal diary belong from day one rather than year three.
Where the published record runs out
Stated plainly, because a comparison article that hides its gaps is not much use.
ALTA's exact CE figures could not be verified from the live site, which serves no readable HTML, and its CE policies page is behind a member login. Carry-forward and audit rules for ALTA are therefore not stated in this article at all.
CERI publishes no audit process and no carry-forward rule. The word "audit" does not appear on its renewal pages.
AOGPE publishes an audit but no audit rate.
NASET publishes no renewal interval, hour count, lapse consequence or audit process.
NILD publishes no lapse consequences, carry-forward or audit process.
AET publishes no conversion rule between the CEUs on its webinar listings and the hours in its policy.
No body publishes reciprocity with any other body's requirements, notwithstanding Wilson's Recognized Providers list, which recognises other bodies as *suppliers* of professional development and not as sources of equivalent obligations.
None of these are legal requirements. They are the private membership and certification policies of professional associations. What your state or your employer requires of you is a separate question with a separate answer, and it belongs with your state education agency — and, if you practise independently, with an attorney. Nothing here is legal advice.
Frequently asked questions
Does one CEU equal one hour?
It depends entirely on who is counting. Under the IACET standard, one CEU equals ten contact hours. AOGPE follows that convention explicitly. CEC does the opposite — "One CEC CEU represents one clock hour." Always convert into the unit the body you are reporting to actually uses, and never assume a figure quoted in one body's newsletter transfers to another's renewal form.
Does supervising count as continuing education?
For AET, yes. Area 3 of its qualifying activities is supervision of an associate member working toward ET/P®, or of a student member in an AET-approved program. No other body on this page publishes an equivalent provision.
If I let my Wilson credential lapse, do I lose my certification?
No. Wilson states it directly: "There are no changes to your status of WRS Certification if you do not renew your Wilson Professional Credential. You will still be considered WRS Certified." You lose the W.D.P. or W.D.T. designation and the directory listing, not the certification.
Can I use one conference to satisfy two bodies?
Above each body's captive minimum, usually yes. Against a captive minimum, no. AET's five AET-sponsored hours and Wilson's twenty Wilson-sourced hours can only be filled by AET and Wilson respectively, and no single event satisfies both.
What happens if I miss AET's ten hours?
Membership converts to General Membership until compliance is re-established. It is a reversible downgrade rather than a revocation, and the level is restored once the requirement is met.
Is there a continuing education requirement for executive function coaches?
Not from an independently accredited body, because as of August 2026 no independently accredited body certifies executive function coaches. NBEFC, which is founder-governed and claims no external accreditation, requires 40 hours every two years. Coaches wanting externally accountable requirements generally hold ICF, BCC or PAAC credentials instead — none of which is EF-specific. The instruments used in EF assessment are a separate question with a firmer evidence base behind it.
One more thing
The reason this is worth an afternoon of your attention is not compliance. It is that most practitioners are already doing more professional development than their credentials require, and getting less credit for it than they could, because the hours land in the wrong buckets.
Map your captive minimums once. The rest of your learning year gets easier, and you stop paying twice for things Area 3 already covers.
Illuminate Educational Therapy Group runs a referral network for educational therapists, learning specialists and executive function coaches. If you want to hear about new practitioner resources as they publish — and to be considered for student matches in your area — join the educator list.
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