The need for continuing education to support a person's business activities, whether an employee/manager in a corporation, or a self-employed person is discussed at length in the companion article mentioned above: Professional Challenges: Introduction, located in the section containing the Professional articles.

High school courses, and to a great extent, college curricula, can only support and prepare a person for business to a certain level. This basic education is just that: basic. It is intended to prepare people with the tools to recognize the need for specific knowledge, to learn how to seek out answers and solutions, and to apply their skills to everyday business life.

About 40 years ago during the 1960's some of the colleges began to recognize that undergraduate business administration courses were too simplistic to be of any help in the real world. Often the curricula were simply advanced courses in the commercial business world which were taught in high school: how to organize the files, correspondence and other vital information within a business, how to operate the business machinery of the time (typewriters, mechanical calculators, adding machines, duplicating machines, and punch-card machines), how to work with business forms (purchase orders, shipping orders, invoices, correspondence), personnel issues (interviewing, hiring, firing, and coping with troublesome employees), etc. Large computers were invading businesses, but there were specialized departments which operated them, not the general employees.

The large colleges began to offer advanced degrees to people in all sorts of businesses, regardless of their undergraduate degrees, thus acknowledging for the first time that "business operation" required skills not casually acquired in any formal academic setting. This was the beginning of the Master's Degree in Business Administration (the MBA), which is now so ubitquitous and sought after as the "magic bullet" which will carry people to the top of business ranks much sooner after graduation than theretofore possible.

The efficacy of an MBA as a universal solution in operating a business is the subject of a lot of controversy among business owners and executives in large companies. But it is a clear sign that the subject matter within the MBA curricula holds some importance across a large spectrum of business activities. These include: accounting fundamentals, taxation, marketing, internal business organization, human relations activities (the successor to the Personnel Departments), computer literacy, advertising, collective bargaining issues (with unions), logistics, product and packaging design, banking, finance, etc.

Since most people will not obtain an MBA, nor will they need one in pursuit of their chosen career, an alternate path must be chosen to obtain knowledge in those subjects mentioned in the previous paragraph. Not all of the subjects, necessarily, but certainly those that might have an impact on their own business. Why? Because there will be people with MBA's competing with them, and there will be employers who, rightly or wrongly, will believe that a person with this advanced degree has an advantage.

The important thing for an employee/manager or self-employed person is the knowledge within these subject areas, not the degree. If the knowledge can be acquired through self-taught means (reading extensively and observing the skills of others) or through having a mentor within a company, these paths to learning can be equal or superior to "book-learning" with no real-life application of the subject matter.

Graduate business schools publish their text book lists. The Internet and business publications offer a myriad of case studies, articles and extensive references to business problems and solutions. These are the sources of education for the ambitious and the energetic. Spending time reading professional material and possibly attending courses at local junior colleges, universities and other places which offer non-credit courses in advanced studies, is far more worthwhile than attending sports functions, watching TV or going to yet another Hollywood movie.