Stop Checking Boxes and Start Actually Learning

Why the CE You Choose Matters More Than the Credits You Earn

Every year, sometime around October or November, the same scramble happens. Tax professionals across the country start counting their CE credits, realize they are short, and grab whatever is cheapest and fastest to hit the requirement before the deadline.

Click through the slides. Pass the quiz. Get the certificate. Move on.

Here is the problem with that approach: the quality of your continuing education directly affects the quality of your practice. And if you are being honest with yourself, you already know that.

Compliance Is Not Competence

You can maintain your license and still be a bad practitioner. CE/CPE requirements are a floor, not a ceiling. Meeting the minimum keeps you credentialed. It does not keep you competent. This is where I get to mention my favorite section of Circular 230, §10.35, which talks about competence.

Circular 230 §10.35(a) - A practitioner must possess the necessary competence to engage in practice before the Internal Revenue Service. Competent practice requires the appropriate level of knowledge, skill, thoroughness, and preparation necessary for the matter for which the practitioner is engaged. A practitioner may become competent for the matter for which the practitioner has been engaged through various methods, such as consulting with experts in the relevant area or studying the relevant law.

That last line is the key. You can become competent through studying and consulting experts. But you have to actually do it.

The tax code changes. Court opinions reshape how we interpret existing law. IRS procedures evolve. The tools we use to serve clients get more powerful and more complex every year.

If your education strategy is to take the same last-minute classes to check a box and call it done, you might rethink it. You might not feel it yet. But your clients will.

I think about this in terms of what I do not know. I have been doing this long enough to understand where my gaps are. I know the areas of tax law where I am strong and the areas where I need to either learn more or know when to refer out. That self-awareness did not come from checking boxes. It came from intentionally pursuing education that pushed me outside my comfort zone. For example, I know absolutely nothing about clergy taxation. It isn’t my market. With that said, I have on my list a good CE class on the topic because I still like to have a basic idea of it, so I can speak intelligently.

What Good Education Actually Looks Like

The best continuing education I have taken has a few things in common.

It is taught by practitioners, not just presenters. When I am learning about IRS representation procedures or practice management, I want to hear from someone who has actually done the work. Someone who can tell me not just what the IRM says, but what happens when the IRS does not follow it. Someone who has sat across from a Revenue Officer and can tell me what actually works versus what sounds good in a textbook. In other words, I’m not attending to hear some funny story that is completely irrelevant.

It goes deep, not wide. A one-hour course on “Quick Updates” is fine for general awareness, but it does not make you better at anything specific. The courses that changed my practice were the ones that spent many hours or classes on a single topic. Depth is what builds expertise. Breadth is what fills a credit requirement.

It challenges what you think you already know. The most valuable CE experience is the one where you realize you have been doing something wrong, or at least not optimally. That moment of “wait, I did not know that” is worth more than a hundred hours of content you already understood.

It creates community. Some of the most impactful learning I have done was not during the lecture. It was during the breaks, the hallway conversations, the post-session discussions with other practitioners who are working through the same problems I am. But please do not be the person who follows the instructor into the bathroom to ask questions. I’ve heard stories and then also experienced it.

You may not get hours for it. Some of the best education I have received is not something that adds hours to my PTIN account. Yes, get your required hours, but truly focus on learning.

High School Dropout

I do not talk about this often, but it matters here.

I dropped out of high school when I was 15. I hated school. I did not think I was learning anything useful. The irony is that the same school system I walked away from had hired me. I was doing all of their IT work. The kid who did not want to sit in a classroom was building and maintaining the technology that kept the classrooms running, and getting pulled out of class to fix issues when things broke.

I got my GED. I spent the next 20+ years in IT, building systems, managing infrastructure, and solving problems. I was good at it. I built a career out of it without a traditional education path.

And then I pivoted into tax.

I am now an Enrolled Agent. A Certified Tax Resolution Specialist. An NTPI Fellow. Certified Real Estate Tax Strategist. Cybersecurity and Microsoft certifications. I teach continuing education courses. I have been quoted in Forbes, CNBC, and others. I have a tax firm that serves clients nationwide. (Oh yeah, I do have an associate's degree and am close to a bachelor's, which I am working on. Not because it will make me more money, but I want the piece of paper. Kinda like an Hermes Birkin, I don’t need it, but…..)

I am telling you this not to brag. I am telling you this because every meaningful credential I hold, every skill that matters in my practice, every bit of expertise that my clients rely on came from education I chose. Not education that was assigned to me. Not education I sat through because someone told me I had to. Education I pursued because I recognized a gap in what I knew and decided to close it.

That is the difference between checking a box and actually learning. But I also came to realize that letters after your name don’t really matter. You can have all kinds of letters after your name, and most people will not know what they mean. People really only care that you can help them and solve their problems.

The Person Who Hated School Now Teaches

There is something almost absurd about the fact that a high school dropout teaches continuing education classes to CPAs and Enrolled Agents. I am aware of the irony. But it actually proves the point.

Formal education did not work for me at 15. It was not that I could not learn. It was that nobody had connected what I was being taught to anything I cared about or could use. The moment learning became practical, became connected to real problems I was trying to solve, I could not get enough of it.

That is exactly how I think about CE now. The courses that changed my career were the ones where I could immediately see how the material applied to a client sitting in my office. The ones where I walked out and did something different the next day. The ones that made me a better practitioner, not just a more credentialed one.

If you are treating CE like I treated high school, going through the motions because someone says you have to, you are wasting your time and your money. Find the education that connects to the work you actually do.

Specialization Requires Specialized Education

Let me get specific, because I think this matters.

If you are telling clients you can handle cryptocurrency taxation and your entire crypto education is a one-hour webinar you took two years ago, you are doing your clients a disservice. The same goes for any specialty area: international, estate planning, representation, and state and local tax. If you hold yourself out as competent in an area, your education should back that up.

Digital assets are a perfect example of why this matters. The landscape changes constantly. DeFi, staking, airdrops, NFTs, etc. The IRS is actively increasing enforcement in this space. The rules are complex, the guidance is often sparse, and the consequences of getting it wrong are real for your clients.

My friend and colleague Matt Metras is one of the foremost cryptocurrency tax experts in the profession. He is an Enrolled Agent, the owner of MDM Financial Services, and has been teaching cryptocurrency taxation for years. He is a contributing writer for Think Outside the Tax Box, moderates the r/cryptotaxation subreddit, and runs the “Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Tax Info” Facebook group. When it comes to crypto tax education, Matt is the real deal.

Matt has a digital asset roundtable that I want to put on your radar.

What I appreciate about Matt’s approach is that he does not just teach you the rules that exist today. He teaches you how to think about transactions where the guidance has not yet caught up. In the crypto space, that happens constantly. Practitioners regularly encounter situations with no direct IRS authority, and knowing how to apply existing code sections to novel fact patterns is a skill that will serve you well beyond cryptocurrency.

If you have clients with crypto holdings and you are not actively building your knowledge in this area, you are either turning away work or handling it without the expertise it demands. Neither option serves your clients well. Matt’s roundtable is a practical way to close that gap.

There are other excellent roundtables available covering general tax and international tax. I attended Matt's roundtable yesterday and walked away rethinking how I approach my entire process for clients who have cryptocurrency.

These programs are all part of The Gorczynski Group's offerings available to Tax Professionals. Tom Gorczynski consistently makes the tax pro community better. A few years ago, I joined his Inner Circle program, and it has been the single most important thing I have done in my practice. I attribute much of my success to this program.

Invest in Yourself Like You Tell Your Clients to Invest in Their Business

We tell our clients all the time to invest in their business. Upgrade your systems. Hire good people. Do not cut corners on things that matter.

We should take our own advice.

Good education costs money. It takes time away from billable work. It sometimes means traveling or blocking out full days during busy periods. I understand all of that. But the return on investment is real.

I can point to specific client outcomes that were better because I invested in learning something I did not know before. Specific cases where knowing a procedure or a strategy made the difference between a good result and a bad one. That is not an expense. That is an investment with compounding returns.

A Challenge

Look at your CE/CPE plan for this year. Not just the credits you need, but the actual courses you are planning to take. What do you want to learn? What do you need to learn?

Ask yourself: am I choosing these because they are easy and cheap, or because they will actually make me better at what I do?

If the answer is the former, change the plan. Find one course this year that genuinely stretches you. One program that goes deep on a topic you have been avoiding or do not feel confident in. One instructor who is a practitioner doing the work, not just presenting slides about it.

Your clients deserve a practitioner who is constantly getting better. You deserve to be one.

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