What is the Difference Between CEUs and CEs?

Whether you are a mental health counselor from Oklahoma, Texas, New York, or New Mexico, you are required to complete continuing education to keep your license active.

Two terms are often used interchangeably in the context of continuing education: CE and CEU.

CE stands for Continuing Education. It is an overarching term that encompasses a wide range of activities, such as face-to-face seminars, in-person workshops, conferences, live webinars, or on-demand courses. CE hours or credits are awarded for participation in these activities. 

The term CEU, which stands for “Continuing Education Unit” was first developed and defined by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) in 1970. Rather than defining one hour of continuing education as one CEU the IACET defines one CEU as being equal to 10 hours of continuing education training.

Somewhere lost in history, the two terms CEU and CE mistakenly became interchangeable in the mental health community, with the term CEU becoming the more popular way to describe continuing education hours.

As evidenced by the graph below, the search term “Counseling CEs” has virtually no searches on Google, whereas, the search term “Counseling CEUs” is much more popular.

The Oklahoma Counseling Institute has become a leader in providing continuing education for Oklahoma LPCs, LMFTs, LADCs, and LCSWs.

While we are still committed to our Oklahoma colleagues, OCI now invites our fellow counselors in our neighboring states of Texas, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arkansas to join us in attending our high quality and affordable continuing education workshops, webinars, and the annual Summer Super Summit. 

To better serve mental health counselors' continuing education needs, the Oklahoma Counseling Institute has applied to become a continuing education provider for the National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC). NBCC provider accreditation is widely accepted by most counseling licensure boards throughout the United States. 

Despite the popularity of the term CEU, the NBCC requires that in order to receive their endorsement as a continuing education provider providers must use the correct term CE rather than CEU when awarding continuing education credit. As a result you will see the term CE rather than CEU to describe hours of continuing education on the Oklahoma Counseling Institute website.

Whether you call it a CEU or a CE, we are here to provide the continuing education you need! 

If you have any questions, please contact us at hello@edmondcounseling.com or call/text (405) 440-3034