Is it ok to duck out of a professional seminar early?

You might remember Lucinda, the licensed mental health-care professional, who sent in a question a little over a year ago about the appropriateness of speakers at professional seminars claiming to not be promoting books they had written when their whole presentations strike Lucinda as a promotion for books they have written on sale at the seminar.

As you might also recall, Lucinda is required to complete a set number of continuing education credits to keep her licensing up to date. To do this requires attending several of these professional seminars every year.

Back then I advised Lucinda that the right thing for presenters at such seminars to do is to give the strongest, most relevant presentations possible, provide strong materials and then let attendees decide if they are interested enough to want to read more from the presenter.

Lucinda is in the middle of her seminar-attending season again to keep up her continuing education. "The seminars can be expensive," Lucinda writes.

Fortunately, the health-care agency she works for reimburses the cost of attending. After each seminar, the attendees fill out an evaluation and are issued a certificate of completion.

"I'm sure some of the others are getting reimbursed for attending these seminars as well," writes Lucinda. But she notes that many attendees leave at least an hour or two before the seminar is concluded.

"Is it wrong to get reimbursed for a seminar if you leave before it's finished?" she asks.

Apparently, Lucinda could leave early too and still get credit for the seminar and her employer would never know. She writes that she stays until the end partly out of wanting to make sure she gets as much from the seminar as possible ("although some are clunkers," she writes) and partly out of a sense of obligation to her employer.

There are two questions worth addressing here. The first isn't one that Lucinda posed, but it's important nonetheless: Is it right to get full credit for a seminar when you leave well before it is over? Issuing credit to someone who doesn't attend the full event seems dishonest and wrong. If the final hours of a seminar are designed to be unessential because the company putting on the seminar knows people leave early, then the seminar provider should consider either dropping those hours or better yet strengthening the curriculum so it is strong from start to finish.

Now to Lucinda's question. The professionals getting reimbursed to attend a seminar should attend the full seminar. If their employers never check or simply don't care, that doesn't change the fact that fulfilling the obligation you committed to is the right thing to do. Being able to shift your responsibility without anyone catching on doesn't make it OK to do so.

If doing the right thing by trying to stay up to date in your profession is so overwhelming that spending an extra hour or two doing so seems unbearable, it might be time to consider finding better seminars or a new line of work. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2020 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.