Changes Impacting on Contemporary Professional Practice and CPE

Abstract

Attention has been drawn, especially in Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7, to activities focused on the professional associations and their CPE. While practitioners and their associations paid attention to these features, changes were taking place in the context in which professionals practice, ie. the world beyond their practice. In Chap. 6, four types of influences on professional education and practice in the 1980s and 1990s were identified. Six areas with a more contemporary impact have been isolated and are the major content of this Chapter. Their impact has been evident from the 1990s to the present. The variety in the six influences chosen illustrates how the context of professional practice has become much more complex in recent decades. The six areas of influence are: consumer protection, competition in the market place, the problem of risk, the global dimension, a new type of compliance and the ideological context.

The six changes selected identify significant features of the political, economic and social context in which professionals’ practise and CPE is conducted. The features illustrate not only changes that had occurred but also the apparent increase in the range of factors that were impacting on professional practice as well as CPE.

Firstly, consumer protection represents the way the relationship between practitioners and their clients has changed. These people were now consumers of their (practitioners’) services. Further that process had become more complex and a raft of legislation had been developed at national and state levels to regulate the relationship and in many cases protect the consumer. Consumer protection illustrated activity involving law making and legislation, while the issue of competition in the marketplace, the second feaure, was located in the area of economics. There were challenges to professionals’ status within an economy struggling with the concept of competition. The third area focused on ‘risk’ to the practitioner, in contrast to a focus on the consumer. Central to this area was the concept of seeking to insure or protect the practitioner from risk and the professional associations assumed an important role. Next examining the importance of the global dimension is illustrated through reference to international bodies representing individual professions as well as relations between professional associations in Australia with their corresponding bodies in other nations. Advances in methods of international travel and especially communciation facilitated these relationships. In the fifth feature, the lack of government control at the national and state levels in CPE’s development has been noted. However, in the changing structure and organisation of labour and the workforce, a new form of CPE (or MCPE) has been identified. It has not however been recognised as part of the training system, as represented by the national VET system. Finally, changes in the perception of the professions, their practice and CPE have resulted in the claims of new ways of perceiving the professions from the status of becoming more and more bureaucratised or losing their identity as holders of a special position and role in their professional area, the intrusion of new ideologies.

Overall, examining these six areas demonstrates how the context for the professions and their work has dramatically changed in the decades of CPE’s origin and development. The challenge for CPE has been to respond to these changes.

The examination of these influences prepares for the rounding off of CPE’s tale in Chaps. 10 and 11.