Leading Learning

Impact is one of the core goals at the heart of most learning businesses, and we believe that impact should be as broad as possible—meaning ideally your learning business delivers significant and relevant results for learners, for the organizations that employ those learners, and for the fields, professions, and industries those learners work in.

In this episode, number 430, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele look at how providing learning paths, offering valued credentials, and aligning with employer needs are three activities that can deliver impact on their own and how the combination of all three is more potent—and a bullseye learning businesses might want to aim for.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Providing learning paths, offering valued credentials, and aligning with employer needs—each of those three activities is powerful on its own. But the combination of the three is even more potent and a bullseye we believe it’s worth learning businesses aiming for.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:30] We often tout the importance of impact. It’s one of the three goals we believe are at the heart of most learning businesses: reach, revenue, and impact.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:38] And we believe that that critical impact piece is broad, meaning ideally your learning business, through its products and services, is delivering significant and relevant results for learners, yes, and also for the organizations that employ those learners and for the fields, professions, and industries those learners work in.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:00] We want to offer one approach to making sure you’re providing relevant results in today’s episode, number 430.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:08] Before we get to that approach, let’s talk about the context because we believe it’s important to understand the context.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:15] Indeed it is. The world and, by extension, the employment market that all of those learners we’re serving are working in have evolved tremendously in recent years. You can think about all of the digital transformation initiatives that you hear about, the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and automation particularly recently, the dynamics of global trade—those are just a few of those big-picture items that are the tip of an iceberg that has so much underneath it.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:47] All of that has contributed to a growing focus on reskilling, upskilling, and general workforce development.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:55] Indeed. You hear lots of buzz, still, about those terms: reskilling, upskilling. They’ve been out there for years, but they’re not going away. We keep hearing about them. General workforce development. The importance of lifelong learning. And we’re now, I think, starting to see more and more of a demand for more targeted and more sophisticated approaches to all of that adult education and training that needs to be going on, that we know needs to be going on.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:23] The money being spent on the adult education, training, and learning that we know needs to happen, that’s big money.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:31] It is indeed. If you look at, say, the Association for Talent Development (ATD) 2023 State of the Industry report, the average organization is investing about US$1,220 per employee.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:48] In the U.S., the amount of state funding allocated to workforce development more than doubled between 2011 and 2020.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:57] We’ll stay in the U.S. here for just a minute. At the federal level, it’s not growing at the same rate, but there’s still big investment at that federal level—US$30 billion annually.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:08] In workforce development.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:10] Workforce development, yes.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:11] And then, if we broaden our lens even more and look at the global continuing education market, that’s been valued by some sources at US$33.6 billion in 2022 with projections for tremendous growth, so that it would be US$58 billion by 2030.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:31] These are just some of the figures that are out there. You can come up with a lot of them. But big numbers are suggesting major and growing focus on ensuring that adults are prepared for productive careers and are supported in learning throughout their working life.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:48] We believe that learning businesses have a major role to play in this situation, to play in supporting those adults throughout their working life.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:58] Indeed, we do. That’s partly because employers can only provide so much of the training and learning that’s needed out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:09] Right. They can and probably should provide some of the training that’s needed. We’re seeing evidence that employers are starting to think of themselves as longer-term professional development providers for their employees. They’re really taking that on as part of their identity.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:24] They are indeed. We’re seeing academic institutions do that as well. But there are topics that can and should come from outside sources, and learning businesses that focus on a particular field or industry—as many associations do, for example—are a natural partner and major player in providing the needed education and training.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:46] Those learning businesses, along with the employers, operate in what we characterize as the third sector of education. If you think about the first sector being a K-12 education (really pre-K-12), then you have the second sector being higher ed for that subset of folks who move on after high school and take some college. But then we have this third sector that needs to serve adult learners once they leave the formal academic education setting and begin work and continue to live. And they are going to have a long working life. In many cases, it might be several decades. We’ve called it the “other 50 years” at times.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:27] Yes, it’s a time now to step back and figure out what really works in serving those other 50 years, that third sector. If you are a learning business, and you’re thinking about supporting these lifelong learners, you’re thinking about supporting the organizations that they’re working for, you’re thinking about supporting the fields and industries that they are a part of, what’s the approach to doing that effectively? And when we look at our research and combine that with decades, at this point, of consulting experience with a wide range of organizations, we’re seeing more and more that successful learning businesses are starting to center their strategies around employment market needs broadly in a way that serves employers, a way that serves the learners themselves, in ways that serve the broader industry with more clarity than we’ve seen in the past. We can talk a little bit about what our data and what our experience are showing at this point.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:25] That gets back to impact that we opened with—that idea of aligning around employment market needs. It’s going to help ensure that the results that you’re helping to deliver as a learning business are relevant, real, and valued in the marketplace.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:45] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Celisa Steele: [00:07:23] We want to raise some other data points. We cited some numbers around the size of the market, what’s being spent on all of this needed training and education that adults, workers, and learners need. But we also have some of our own data that we can share and that we’d like to draw on.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:41] We do. At the end of the past several years, we’ve conducted a survey to determine what learning businesses are already doing—what they’ve already been doing during the course of that year and up until then—and how they plan to focus their educational efforts and resources in the coming year.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:00] We asked about 14 different focus areas. And, again, like you were saying, Jeff, we ask, “Are you already doing something in these areas? Are you planning to start doing something in the coming year? Or do you not have plans to do anything with this in the year ahead?”

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:15] Again, we’ve asked about those 14 areas over a number of years now. We’ve been able to see how they evolve and what kind of picture they paint of what learning businesses are doing or plan to do. When we asked at the end of 2023, looking out toward 2024 and what we might expect to happen in 2024, three areas stood out for us as potentially related when it comes to how learning businesses can create significant impact in supporting not just the individual learner but also those employers and the broader profession or industry that the learning business serves.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:54] Here are those three areas. The first is aligning offerings with specific career or job paths relevant to learners. That could be through something like a competency model, a learning pathway, or targeted curricula. And of the respondents to our survey at the end of 2023, 83.5 percent reported already doing or planning to do something in that area around aligning offerings with career or job paths.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:23] In addition to that, we asked about pursuing new or alternative approaches to credentialing, which could include things like certificate programs, microcredentials, and digital badges. And 73.4 percent of respondents reported already doing or planning to pursue that as an area—newer, alternative approaches to credentialing.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:46] The third area we want to mention is integration of educational offerings into the learning and development programs of employers in a field or industry or into general workforce development needs. And 69.4 percent of respondents to our survey reported already doing or planning to do that in 2024.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:09] If you take those three together—so you’ve got the paths (career or job paths), alternative credentials, and then satisfying an employer need or general workforce development need—if you picture those as a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles (hopefully not too hard to do even if you’re listening to an audio podcast), think of those three intersecting circles, and right there in the middle where those three circles overlap, you get what we think of as a bullseye.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:42] When learning businesses provide education and training offerings that align to a career path or a job path, they offer a credential around that path that is viewed as valid and is useful in the employment market, and, if they do all of this in a way that integrates into the programs and needs of the employers in the field or industry they serve, then tremendous value is created for all those stakeholders. That’s the bullseye, as you just called it, Jeff, and that’s what we think learning businesses can aim for.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:13] Why? Why do we think that this is a bullseye to aim for? Why does it matter so much?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:19] As many learning business leaders have already realized, learner expectations have risen significantly. They’re really expecting a lot more from educational experiences that they invest in. A lot of expectations changed as a result of experiences during COVID, for example.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:40] Yes, people certainly came out of COVID with different viewpoints on online learning, and that influenced then how they think about face-to-face learning. We’re seeing that both learners and their employers are seeking more value for their investment in both face-to-face and online education and that the traditional conference approaches and traditional online educational offerings are increasingly perceived as not necessarily providing that level of value that they’re seeking.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:14] On top of all that, we have a world where competition for a learner’s attention is really, really high. Just getting through to somebody, getting read in their inbox can be incredibly difficult. There’s also competition for wallets. What will that learner choose to spend their limited dollars on? And then also there’s competition for the employers’ wallets as well. What are they willing to invest in on behalf of their employees? And so being able to hit this bullseye that we just described can really stand a learning business out as the education provider in whatever its specific field or industry is.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:57] Definitely much easier to get attention and to get a share of wallet if you can say that this is really providing that pathway for the learner—it’s got some good credentials standing behind it; it’s meeting a market need. People are much more likely to pay attention to that in the first place, as we’re saying, and then be willing to spend money for it. We’re talking about fairly sophisticated stuff here: learner pathways, alternative credentials, thinking about this whole world of workforce development. Hitting that sort of bullseye requires a level of strategic focus and potentially resources beyond what a learning business may currently have at its disposal or what it’s been accustomed to doing.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:46] If that sounds like you, if you’re listening to this and thinking, “Wow, this sounds like a lot to bite off,” one place that we recommend you can start is by assessing your current situation, really understanding what the gaps are that are potentially preventing you from being able to execute on this kind of strategy. We do have a tool that we’ve talked about before that we think can be helpful in helping you understand your situation—that’s the Learning Business Maturity Model.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:14] Yes, because this really is about how highly tuned are you as a learning business that has the capacity and the capabilities to deliver this kind of experience, to deliver this kind of value and impact that we’re talking about here. The Learning Business Maturity Model and the accompanying assessment give you a way to get a view into that and to determine, “Are we the type of organization that can deliver this value that we’re talking about, that can hit this kind of bullseye for our market? Or do we have areas that we need to do work in?” The model and the assessment are going to help you identify those areas like, “This is where we need to be able to improve if we are going to be the market-leading learning business that can provide this type of value, this type of experience for learners, their employers, and this field or industry that we serve.”

Celisa Steele: [00:15:04] Another thing we can say is, if you’re thinking, “Wow, this sounds like a lot to do to hit this bullseye,” this is a place where you can think about partnerships. We like to talk about partnerships a lot on the podcast, in part because we do believe that, when those players operating in that third sector can complement each other, there’s a lot of value to be delivered to the learner and the employer and the field, profession, and industry by partnering and collaborating when appropriate. So you, as the learning business, don’t necessarily have to “own” the digital credential or the certificate program that might be part of this bullseye, but, if you’re in partnership with someone who is owning that piece of it, and you’re tightly collaborating, you can still achieve those three pieces. It just may be that you’re bringing two, and someone else is bringing one piece of the puzzle.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:56] We mentioned earlier—you mentioned, Celisa—that employers themselves, at least the larger and more sophisticated ones who have a dedicated learning and development function, are starting to take this whole idea of professional development and continuing education much more seriously in how they’re thinking about things. There are most likely coalitions of employers within your field that you can be in partnership with. We mentioned in passing that academic institutions are getting much more interested in this, continuing education, professional development becoming much more of a focus. A lot of times they’ve got the content; they may have the connections in their particular region of the country or whatever the case might be, but fertile opportunities for partnering in a variety of different ways to meet what is going to be a very dynamic and evolving need. There really is no one organization that can address a need like this. Partnerships, I think, are just so key to doing this.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:55] And delivering the type of value, the kind of impact that’s at the center of this Venn diagram that we’re talking about, we’re getting to the point where that’s table stakes. That’s what people are going to expect. Again, they’re looking for that high return on investment. Being able to deliver that kind of impact, that kind of value isn’t going to be optional. Learners and employers have too many other options or too many competing demands to make the investment if they can’t be assured that there’s some big return and some real value and significant results in that investment.

Jeff Cobb: [00:17:31] Our view is now is the time to pull back. Consider approaches like learning paths, career paths that we’ve talked about here. Consider alternative credentials, credentialing in general, how that fits into how you’re serving your market. Consider how you’re supporting the workforce in your particular field or industry. What support can your organization provide? Pull back, and consider those three things, those three overlapping circles in that Venn diagram—and then aim for that bullseye.

Jeff Cobb: [00:18:11] Providing learning paths, offering valued credentials, and aligning with employer needs—each of those three activities is powerful on its own. But the combination of the three is even more potent and a bullseye we believe it’s worth learning businesses aiming for.

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The post A Bullseye for Learning appeared first on Leading Learning.

Having a strategy is part of what any learning business needs to thrive. But what does establishing a strategy look like? In this episode, number 429, we get a peek behind the strategy-developing curtain in a conversation.

Pam Rosenberg, director of education for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing, has been in the exciting role of helping to develop ASNT’s first formal education strategy.

Pam talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Celisa Steele about build, borrow, and buy choices for creating a catalog; the need to assess the quality of learning content; competition from subject matter experts; the reality and challenge of serving check-the-box learners; the importance of connection; and more.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:00:00] We’re really at a great point in our education strategy because we have the world in front of us to expand and develop and all those good things.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:16] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:24] Having a strategy is part of what any learning business needs in order to thrive. But what does establishing a strategy look like? In this episode, number 429, we get a peek behind the strategy-developing curtain in a conversation with Pam Rosenberg. Pam is director of education for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing, and she’s been in the exciting role of helping to develop ASNT’s first formal education strategy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:53] While the association has existed for a long time (it was founded in 1941), the establishment of a formal education department is a recent development in the organization’s history. With the establishment of that education department came the need to develop an education strategy and the need to get content quickly as ASNT didn’t have a catalog of education to start. The association went the route of acquiring an e-learning catalog to jumpstart their efforts.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:21] Pam talks with Celisa about build, borrow, and buy choices for creating a catalog; the need to assess the quality of learning content; competition from subject matter experts; the reality and challenge of serving check-the-box learners; the importance of connection; and more. Celisa and Pam spoke in late June 2024.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:53] Tell us about the American Society for Nondestructive Testing—what it does in general and then a sketch of what it offers in terms of learning opportunities.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:02:04] Yes. Nondestructive testing is exactly what it sounds like. The technicians and the engineers and all that, they test things without taking them out of production. Or they do a CT scan. Like you go to the hospital to get a CT scan on a part of your body, they’ll do a CT scan on an airplane engine or a helicopter engine and figure out where it will fail or if this has enough integrity so that it won’t fail, like welds on roller coasters, welds on the hulls of ships to make sure that they’re safe. A year ago, when the Titan submersible went underwater, there was NDT (nondestructive testing) that was done on that to tell the owners of that vessel that it’s going to fail, not if it’s going to fail. A nice little shout-out to our industry. But NDT professionals are huge in rail. NDT is literally everywhere, and it’s one of those industries that you have never heard of because the NDT professionals keep us safe. Bridges, food, toys, cars, clothing—anything that you touch has gone through some level of NDT inspection.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:18] It’s fascinating to think about how pervasive it is, and yet I don’t tend to talk about nondestructive testing other than when I have an opportunity, like today, to talk with you. So tell us a little bit about the learning opportunities that ASNT has out in the world.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:03:35] ASNT is very unique with our education strategy and offerings. ASNT has been around a very long time, like a lot of other associations have been, but there was not a formal education strategy; it was housed under a different department and didn’t have a standalone strategy. Two summers ago, the board had approved the business case to establish a formal education department and, with that, an education strategy. We are 18, 19 months into having a formal strategy at this point, and our bread and butter—prior to our education department and prior to myself and my team coming on board—was that we had these instructor-led trainings for a certification prep course. That was the bread and butter, and then, of course, conference education and training. But, again, those are housed under our events team. That’s one of the main functions of meetings and conferences is the learning aspect of it.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:04:43] So we do have those, and we have a very robust set of publications, and that’s been where a lot of the training primarily came from as well, but, again, not through ASNT instructors out in the field but experts and professionals training their own selves. We now have what you would consider to be a typical training department. We’re still very immature, and I don’t say that in a bad way, in terms of where we are with that strategy. I have matured a lot since our education department inception, but we are still getting our footing in terms of making a name for ourselves in the NDT industry, that ASNT is an education provider. We have e-learning products, which are self-paced, and they range from 8 to 20 or 8 to 40 contact hours’ worth of training, and then instructor-led offerings. And we’re really at a great point in our education strategy because we have the world in front of us to expand and develop and all those good things.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:49] When we think about how to put together a portfolio for a learning business, there are choices. There are different ways to go about finding things to put into a portfolio. At the highest level, we could think about it as this as build, borrow, buy, which I’ve heard you talk about in the past, and I know that you have some experience with thinking through those choices. Tell us a little bit about thinking through those choices and then, ultimately, your decision to go that buy route for ASNT.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:06:22] Yes, we can dig into it a little bit. In the initial business case to establish an education strategy for ASNT was…we don’t have a catalog of offerings yet to spring us forward. So that was one of the initial objectives. One of the first tasks that our new team had to do was acquire and close on a training company. It was an e-learning catalog, and it was fully established. Depending on who you ask, it’s 16 to 20 different products, depending on which way you’re looking at it, but it was a really unique way to jumpstart our offerings.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:07:04] There are pluses and minuses to buying something outright, and we’ll definitely get into that a little bit, but that was really unique. It forced us to learn very quickly what this industry is, and we’re still learning to this day because, again, we are not the NDT professionals; we are just the people that bring everyone together for the learning, for the networking and engagement, and so on. That was a crash course, so to speak, to literally put us on the map as a training provider. Since then it has afforded us a lot of opportunities. Once the dust settled on the acquisition and us being the owners of this wonderful catalog of offerings, it allowed us to use that revenue to continue to push forward and think strategically about what new offerings we can build, buy, or borrow.

Celisa Steele: [00:08:03] The driving reason, at least initially for this buy decision, was because you needed something to have in that catalog as you were going out with this newly formed education department. Talk a little bit about what you’ve learned from that process that might then help you in the future. Or perhaps other people think through that choice around when it makes sense to do what you did and buy/acquire some outside content.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:08:32] Great question. Unless you’re working directly with another actually established training association or an organization that has thoughtfully and intentionally used best practices when developing their training, there’s going to be a lot of things that we uncovered and that you, potential buyers, will uncover when you do finally get the keys to the castle. Without getting too nitty-gritty on it, everyone can call themselves a trainer, and everyone is an expert on something. But, unless you have someone like an instructional designer whose expertise is building learning, not just throwing words on a deck and recording it and calling it a training, there’s going to be some deficiencies in terms of how the material is presented. Again, this is a blanket statement. I’m not saying that this will be the case in any acquisition that you potentially come across, but, really thinking strategically, you probably won’t get the full keys to the castle until money is exchanged and ink is on paper, so that is something to be aware of. And, when the industry changes and knowledge changes and grows and advances and things like that, having that ability to adapt easily with that material that you’ve acquired can probably be a bit of a challenge.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:09:57] It’s hard. People think one hour of training, “Oh, yeah, I’ll just record it, and I’ll edit it. It won’t take a long time.” I don’t remember exactly what the calculation is, but I know for a live presentation, one hour of live instructor-led training—for lack of a better term—is 10 hours of prep time for every single hour. I think that’s what the calculation is. For e-learning or self-paced online, I think one hour of contact learning is 80 or 100 hours. Again, I may be way off on that calculation. I’m not the expert on that. That’s why there are instructional designers and learning professionals. But it’s enormous. And, if you want to do it the right way, again, you could record a presentation and call it learning, but for the knowledge to transfer successfully and to make it be a successful product, some thought needs to go into it, not just what the words are that are coming out.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:59] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Celisa Steele: [00:11:36] So you used that content initially to have something in your portfolio, and then it sounded like you were using the revenue that came from the acquisition, those 16 to 20 products that you then had in your catalog, to be able to fund things that you were deciding to build in-house. Is that true?

Pam Rosenberg: [00:11:53] I’m not going to get into the financial aspect of it because, to be quite honest, I don’t understand the accounting side of it and the investment that we had to make upfront to acquire this. But it has allowed us to take a strategic look at what our competitors are doing and where there are some gaps there and for us too because this industry is very interesting. A huge percentage of the NDT industry are people that call themselves trainers, educators, and facilitators, so we have a lot of competition. But where we excel is we have the learning staff, not just NDT people who have taken on a training role—they play a very important part in this industry; I’m not downplaying them at all. But it allows us to work on—buzzword—“partnerships.” Who has the advanced training but doesn’t have the mechanics to get people in seats? So that’s where we’ve spent a lot of our time. Where can we make those connections with people that have that established training? Can we take a look at it? How does this sound, and where can we elevate it and then also bring people to the training because of our name and our reputation? That has allowed us to do that and make some great new connections that way, and that has also allowed us to, in turn, work with our subject matter experts.

Celisa Steele: [00:13:12] Are you selling B2B and doing bulk sales into an organization? Are you in the subscription space or some sort of bundling space? I’d be curious to know how you’re approaching any packaging and whether it is B2B or B2C.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:13:30] Great question. Before we acquired—again, I’m strictly speaking e-learning because that’s what makes up the bulk of our revenue at this particular moment—it was definitely a mixture, but heavy leaning on B2B sales, and that was a lot of the customers that we retained through that acquisition. It is a lot of bulk purchasing and figuring out what that model looks like. But, again, at the end of the day, we’re a member association, so making sure that we are walking that delicate balance of we’re not just going to give away the farm because you’re guaranteeing us 10 seats or 10 enrollments or something like that. Making sure that some of their particular customers who have an academic lens, is there an opportunity for your students to be involved with ASNT? Again, to make sure that we’re cultivating young and newer entering NDT professionals in the field and learning about their purchasing habits. So we do have a fair amount of one-off sales here and there to individual companies and NDT firms. Right now it’s a good mix of both, and we’re trying to convert a lot of them into those bulk purchasing groups because we get to build a connection with them, and it’s really helping to figure out what our top sellers are, and that will help drive a lot of decisions going forward.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:53] I mentioned build, borrow, buy and so we talked about buying this catalog. You’ve talked some about building internally and partnering with some of the subject matter experts that are already in the field but maybe don’t have some of the skill sets that you can add in terms of, on the marketing side, getting the people in the seats, or, on the instructional design side, trying to improve those products. Talk a little bit about what “borrow” means in your mind. I don’t know if you’re doing anything with the borrow model at this point, but, if you are, I’d love to hear that.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:15:24] Yes. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, we are working with some industry training providers or people that have very unique or advanced techniques. Again, this is specific to our industry. They’ve got the 40-hour training. We cannot build that mostly. We don’t have a million dollars to go buy a machine and then put it in our training facility. So we need to borrow their training, but they benefit from it, and we benefit from it. We get more exposure, and they do as well. In a lot of industries, there’s a particular subsection of the industry itself, and there’s only one or two players that have the technology or that have the equipment to do these types of things.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:16:13] In a previous organization, in medical gases, the only person in the game was this one company, so it made sense to go with them. There wasn’t any rough competition because we were going with that provider. I can’t think of another example that is across the board. This allows us to “borrow” in a sense, but we are also in an agreement through our e-learning. I was previously talking about live instructor-led. In an e-learning aspect, I think aviation—very, very technical. But another group has developed this e-learning course, and it allows us to—it was part of the acquisition, one of the catalog products—it allows us to easily keep something out there under the ASNT umbrella but fulfilled somewhere else.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:17:04] Those, I feel, have a little bit of an advantage in a different way because you didn’t have to build it, and it’s much easier—maybe not much easier—to terminate that and pull it from the catalog because you don’t have the ownership of it. You don’t have the depreciation on the asset and things like that. So that one is a little bit easier to have in your catalog because you’re not the full owner of it, and you are not necessarily responsible for maintaining the content. However, there is the other side of that. You are not responsible for maintaining the content. It’s harder to say, “Hey, why isn’t this updated? When are you going to get to this technology?” You don’t have that control. You’re dependent on who you’re borrowing from. And, again, if that training company that you’re borrowing from has some bad press in the news, how does that impact you as a partnering organization that’s borrowing and licensing that? What is your exposure and liability? Which is probably, hopefully not much if you’ve done your due diligence, but there is that potential risk.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:07] You’ve worked at other associations beyond ASNT. You were at the Risk Management Association, the American Society for Plumbing Engineers. Those are fairly different fields, but your focus has always been on education in those associations. I’m curious to know, in your experience, have you seen common themes, opportunities, or common challenges that apply when thinking about education—no matter what the industry—whether it’s risk management or nondestructive testing or engineering? Whatever it is.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:18:45] People want to feel connected. Whether they would say that out loud or not, they want to feel connected to an experience or to the training and the learning that they’re going through. Whether feeling connected to an e-learning course is a little bit harder, you want to make sure that it is speaking to you and that you are the right audience for what the training is built for. Because, if you can’t make a connection and pick up those buzzwords, and it’s worthless, you probably won’t have a repeat customer on your hands, or you won’t have a returning member. I find that to be a really key component of what has kept me in the education space because there is something so special about seeing the lightbulb turn on with a learner, whether they’re taking an exam prep course, or they’re just learning the fundamentals of the math side of things. It’s having that opportunity to get true comprehension and have that ability to ask peers that are in the classroom but also, whether it’s through a discussion forum or live with the instructor, have a way to connect with them because that’s going to make a huge difference.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:20:01] So much of how we learn is on the job. That contradicts what I was just saying. But you have to have the right tools to learn on the job, and you have to have the right foundation. And, with education specifically—you can say the e-learning and the self-paced ones, depending on how you’ve built it—but putting people in a room together allows you to make those new connections and not necessarily ask the…because the expert in the room is the instructor or the facilitator, but, “Oh, yeah, this other student said something that was really thought-provoking.” Those are the biggest takeaways as an education provider but also as someone in the room. Those are the things that stick with you the most, and giving people that opportunity to get together in an education setting has been, again, what has kept me in the education side of the association house.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:00] That’s great. I appreciate the focus on connection because I think you’re right that, so often, learners are there for connection although they probably wouldn’t say they’re there for connection. If you ask them, they’ll say they’re there for the content or something related to that. But I do think that is such an important part and the benefit of peer learning, and what you can learn from those around you is huge for adults, and especially adults that are in a shared profession or field. To have that chance to interact and hear from one another can be a really big part of the value that comes from any learning experience.

Celisa Steele: [00:21:44] You’ve been working in education in a variety of organizations for a number of years at this point. If you had to look back and think about, from where you started to where things are now, what big shifts, or even small ones, have you noticed over the course of your career?

Pam Rosenberg: [00:22:02] What hasn’t changed a lot is—and I don’t get credit for saying this—a large percentage of the learners that I’ve interacted with, a lot of them are here to check a box. “I got the training. I got the certificate.” I don’t get credit for that statement, but that’s just an observation that we’ve made as an education team. But, again, you have to be so much more thoughtful about what the training is, with a little bit of “choose your own adventure” sprinkled in there. Because you can advertise a product all day. You can say, “The prerequisites need to be this. You need to have the 101 in this particular topic.” But you know that people are going to show up and not have the 101 completed, or they’re showing up there on the 300 level. They’re just there to get recertification hours. That will be consistent all the time. But, to have a true impact, you really need to build, in my opinion, “Here’s this training. It’s a total of 20 hours, but I need 50 percent of my time to be focused on this. But the outline shows it’s only 20 percent of this. What is a way that I can get more learning specifically on this?” As an education professional, I need to spend more time on the legal and financial aspects of association management because that’s not where my expertise is. How can I find something that has been curated that will allow me to do this association training or go to this association conference, that will allow me to choose a slightly different track or a different end goal? Because I know the fundamentals of education or whatever the cases are. I’m the membership professional. But, financially, that’s very hard because building these really robust and advanced products takes a lot of thought and effort.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:24:01] The tech is changing very, very fast, and we don’t even know what it’s going to look like in three months from now, let alone in a year, to make that case for why we need this tool to help us do this or why we need to spend the contract hours to work with a subject matter expert, for example. That, I think, is what I’ve seen as a need a bit more. And, not new to the association space, but there is an organization or a firm that’s going to come to you, that says, “I need these people trained on this, but they already have these things fulfilled, so they don’t really need to take your level one training. They really need level one and a half and level two.” So finding ways to make your products mold to your clients better is something that…because, again, everyone has similar end goals, but how they get there sometimes varies a little bit, and every organization has slightly different needs about what they need from their learners. I guess that was a long way of saying you’ve got to build a choose-your-own-adventure-type scenario. That’s where I see things going.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:11] You’re talking about, I think, personalization, without saying that buzzword there. And maybe part of why you’re avoiding it is because I think that we don’t know how to do that in a cost-effective and meaningful way. But, whatever we can do to allow the learner to tailor our solution to their specific needs, that’s very valuable, so that they can spend their time focused on what they need to focus on, so that they can choose their own adventure.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:25:43] Yes, exactly.

Celisa Steele: [00:25:45] That last question was having you look back, think about your past and what’s changed or remained the same with education. If you look to the future, and you think about continuing education, professional development, and lifelong learning, are there trends or ideas that you have your eye on or things that you see coming that interest you?

Pam Rosenberg: [00:26:07] I would love to figure out what the solution is to allow learners to easily—because people are doing it—have that blend of learning. Again, I’m strictly speaking for adult learning here. “Hey, here’s this product. You have homework to do beforehand. You’re going to have homework to do in between the modules.” Really put the learners in the room together and have thoughtful conversations around that, and allow for more peer-to-peer learning with guided, SME-guided, instructor conversations. Because, again, people learn so much more by having those conversations, asking those questions, and not being afraid to ask those questions because someone in the room has had those questions, and that’s why everyone is in this shared room together. This kind of 360 approach where there’s a little bit of…there are training companies and associations that do this, but allowing people to balance their time between “I’ve got my work hat on, so I can do my professional development” but also juggle the work responsibilities and the home responsibilities, and allow for people to have the space in between the training to sit and think about it.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:27:31] I think that is really, really beneficial because you’re not going to absorb it in the lecture. When you sit and think about it and digest, and then you come back and revisit that conversation, that’s where that knowledge transfer stays. It’s habit. You commit it to memory, and then it becomes more of a habit rather than, again, something that I did, and I don’t remember anything I learned even though I finished it 30 minutes ago. Allowing for more intentional…. And there’s that balance because that’s going to be less people that are taking the training, but you’ll have a better response, and then people that have success with the program will do the marketing for you. “Oh, I took this course. You need to do this. And it doesn’t cost us anything to market and find that person.” So, yes, the cost of the acquisition is a lot lower when you have more thoughtful and intentional training.

Celisa Steele: [00:28:21] We do always like to ask guests about their own lifelong learning given that this is the Leading Learning Podcast. Talk a little bit about your sources, habits, or practices when you think about your own lifelong learning.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:28:39] As I’ve been in this association space—and I talked to it previously—I learned the most at conferences or little networking sessions from the hallway conversations. “Oh, hey, I saw that you spoke on this topic. This is how we’ve done it.” Or “Can you share more with me about that?” Being in the room and listening to the subject matter experts but also listening to peers because chances are people that are in the seats are in the same position that I’m in—allowing those open discussions. That’s where I get the most out of it. I love learning with people together, and I also love bringing people together that are not necessarily in my area. I’m not in the education space. I’m bringing people together in the membership space to talk about something. Is there something in that the membership space at ASNT? Can I learn? Can I take some of those nuggets away about how they’re doing it? What I do is not membership-related directly, but let’s think about that. I definitely read the articles, the best that I can, that come out in the industry, publications, and things like that.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:29:59] I have found that my greatest leap for association management came from the CAE prep course. I was able to participate in that through Association Forum in the Chicago area. I did my absolute most learning through there, and I still use that learning to this day, especially when it’s areas outside of education. Legally this. Financially that. Because, again, I know enough that’ll raise a red flag to say, “I don’t know enough about this, but this is something that I need to be aware of. I need to go talk to somebody else.” And that has kept us out of trouble, or me out of trouble, in a lot of aspects. I don’t have a problem raising my hand, saying, “I don’t know what this means,” or “Can you explain this a little bit more?” Just love learning what other associations do because, chances are, you’re not that disconnected from another association that will allow you to make those connections that “We have this opportunity.” I can’t remember exactly when it was; I want to say it was earlier in this calendar year.

Pam Rosenberg: [00:31:04] But, again, we do magnetic res, and we use the same kind of technology, the NDT profession does, as when you go get an MRI. It’s the magnetic particle testing. It’s the same. So let’s talk with the medical imaging group, and how do they use it? Bring one of their experts to us, and they can use one of our experts for their training. It’s a wonderful way to keep learning and expand your knowledge. One of the best sessions that I ever sat in on was two associations ago. There was a session on plumbing aboard a spaceship and plumbing for NASCAR as well. It was so fun. Nobody in the room will ever probably have that opportunity to do space shuttle plumbing. Never. But it’s the way that the people in the room were thinking about how to solve these problems, that we’re able to take back and apply to our everyday. When you’re in the room with these kinds of people, it’s so cool, and it’s such a unique experience. So I will always be a lifelong learner. That’s just who I am.

Jeff Cobb: [00:32:19] Pam Rosenberg is director of education for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing.

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Most learning businesses have three goals at heart: reach, revenue, and impact.

Reach deals with clearly identifying who you can and should serve and then connecting with them. Impact involves delivering real results for learners, organizations, fields, professions, and industries. Revenue is the lifeblood that keeps a learning business alive.

Very few would disagree that impact and reach are important, but making money off education can cause discomfort to some. And so in this episode we focus on the necessity, the reality, and the opportunity revenue represents.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:00] While huge amounts of money are spent on continuing education, professional development, and other forms of lifelong learning, learning businesses often bump up against beliefs that education and learning should be free or low-cost enough to be accessible to all.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:20] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:21] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:29] We believe most learning businesses have three goals at heart: reach, revenue, and impact.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:35] Reach deals with clearly identifying who you can and should serve and then connecting with as many of those identified learners as you can.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] Impact is what makes you relevant and effective by delivering significant and real results for learners, organizations, fields, professions, [and] industries.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:55] Revenue is the lifeblood that keeps a learning business alive. And it’s the revenue piece of this triumvirate that we want to focus on today, in episode 428.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:06] Why pick on revenue out of those three? Why do we want to focus on revenue today?

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:11] Because, interestingly, out of those three, it’s the one that can get a little bit of pushback. Or maybe pushback isn’t quite the right word. I think it can create some discomfort. Very few people are going to disagree that impact and reach are important. Of course you want to have an impact. Of course you want to reach the right people. But revenue, you’re mixing money and education. It feels a little bit like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that.”

Celisa Steele: [00:01:39] Maybe part of the reason that we’re a little uncomfortable when it comes to education, learning, and money is that in the U.S., K-12, or even pre-K-12, is free. And so it may be that we are conditioned from a very early age to perceive of education as free, and then we come to expect that it should be free and open to all. Now, of course, there are private schools all along that pre-K-12 spectrum, but there is also this free option that exists.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:12] Of course, we might call it the not-paid-for-directly option because nothing is free. But, nonetheless, if you’ve got a child, and you want to put them into this system, the system is there because it has been funded for you to participate.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:24] The kindergartner is not having to fork over money out of her own pocket. But, yes, it obviously has to be paid for somehow. But this idea or this association that many of us have between learning and education and low or no cost, that can create some interesting implications for learning businesses and what they can charge for their products and services. There can be a lot of downward price pressure because of this idea of free, and don’t we want everyone to have access to education? And, by making it free, we open up how many people can benefit from this.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:03] And that everyone aspect to the openness and accessibility of K-12 education in particular, that also has implications for what learning businesses provide. There’s this impulse that you want the portfolio to cover the full gamut from beginner to expert and all the subjects and topics that might be needed in whatever your particular field or profession is, and you might feel that even more if you have a membership base within that field and profession that’s looking to you for education. But then, of course, trying to offer everything and then trying to offer it for free or even at a very low price just isn’t a very viable model in most instances.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:43] Which leads us to the necessity of revenue. Even learning businesses that are organized as nonprofits and learning businesses that offer education as a member benefit, even in those contexts learning businesses are going to seek to maximize revenue. Or maybe we should say we believe they should seek to maximize revenue because that means more money is there to be put against delivering on the big-picture mission of that learning business, whether that’s helping to raise the bar in a particular field or profession or whether it’s about empowering each individual to attain their highest level of realization. Whatever it is, by having more revenue, you’re able to do more of that work.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:22] Yes, you want to be paid as well as you reasonably and fairly can for the level of value that you’re providing. Of course, we do advocate that learning businesses provide very high value that they are then charging commensurately for. And, of course, the reality is that education is a big driver of revenue, is a big source of revenue, particularly for the types of organizations that we’re talking to—we’re talking to learning businesses. This is your business. If you look at associations, for example, a big segment of this learning business world that we serve, education is a huge source of nondues revenue for those organizations. Of course, it is one that aligns very much with their missions in serving their members and in serving the fields, professions, industries that they exist to serve.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:11] We also look at continuing education units that are housed at academic institutions—those PCO units (professional and continuing and online units) that don’t tend to grant degrees. But those have become really big business, frankly, for academic institutions and one that offers a way for a lot of academic institutions to be making money as they’re facing declining enrollments in this enrollment cliff that is being forecast. And so you have again a sense where the learning business is providing a lot of revenue that is helping with the overall organization and its mission.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:49] Yes, and I think, in this case, revenue is helping these organizations, or perhaps prodding these organizations, to rethink their role or to update how they think about their role and how they think about their strategies. They’re not just providing the higher education for that 18- to, say, 25-year-old traditional academic degree student, but they are now much more about who is this post-traditional student that we’re serving, and how do we look at lifelong learning as our role as a college or university? There is money to be made there, but there is also a mission there that is, I think, a good and valid role for colleges and universities to be playing in society.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:31] You already touched on it, but, if a learning business is freestanding and it’s not embedded in that academic institution, it’s not embedded in an association, well, in that case, revenue is absolutely 100-percent necessary because, without that revenue, that learning business doesn’t have other sources to keep it going and making it viable and sustainable over time.

Celisa Steele: [00:06:56] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:07:33] Let’s talk about the ways in which revenue flows and produces results—all of this getting and spending that’s going on in the education market. How can we break this down a little bit?

Celisa Steele: [00:07:46] For one, we know that employers are spending a lot on training and continuing education and professional development. There’s one statistic that the global corporate training market was valued at about US$383 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach US$485 billion by 2028. Really huge numbers. You have these employers that have these employees; they want them to be able to perform well, to perform better; so they’re investing a lot of money in making that happen.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:23] Individual learners are spending for themselves as well—another one of those sets of stats that’s floating around out there. The U.S. continuing education market is estimated to be worth $93.3 billion by 2028. A lot of Bs we’re throwing around—billions. These are big markets, and all of that spending is not necessarily individuals, but a lot of it is. We’ve seen the rise of these services like, say, a Udemy, and Udemy is split between…they serve corporate buyers, but they also serve a huge number of individual buyers who are going out to buy that one course they need on that one topic. Or MasterClass. Or any number of these different providers that are out there. And individuals are pulling out that credit card and investing in these lifelong learning experiences.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:15] You have the individual learners. You have the employers. You also have a lot of money being spent on workforce development; a lot of that’s coming through governmental agencies or quasi-governmental agencies that are trying to say, okay, the economy, we need to think about the economy. And a big way to help the economy is to make sure that we have a workforce that can fill the jobs that are needed to fuel that and have that all running along. So a lot of money is being put in there. One stat we can cite there is that, since January of 2021, the Department of Commerce in the U.S. has dedicated more than $1.6 billion that goes into things around workforce investment, including education as a big part of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:59] All of this speaks to that demand side of the equation in classic economics. There is a demand out there for education. There are people; there are organizations; there are governments that are willing to spend this money, that want to spend this money, to invest in education and training for a whole range of different needs and purposes. But they are prepared. If you are in the learning business and need to generate revenue, you’ve got sources of revenue. But those sources do have expectations.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:30] That’s right. In the simplest terms, we can say that they’re expecting a return on investment. It’s going to cost that learner time, and it’s going to usually cost someone some dollars for that training, whether it’s the employer paying or that learner paying out of her own pocket, but there’s going to be some money spent. And so the learner and the employer have expectations. They have the belief that spending the time and money on this is going to create some kind of result. That’s really important to think about. That gets us back to impact. We talked about reach, revenue, and impact at the beginning. But part of it is that, if people are going to put that revenue out there, it needs to come with some impact around it. Expectations are on the rise, given the proliferation of free or very low-cost resources that are out there. Especially if you’re trying to charge, which we believe most learning businesses are and should be, and especially if you’re trying to charge at any kind of premium level, you’re going to need to make sure that you are delivering value. And you mentioned value earlier, Jeff.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:33] Yes, and we’ve seen this shift a lot during our careers. We’ve been doing this for decades now. As you just said, Celisa, there’s a lot more competition, a lot more options out there than there used to be. A lot of that’s because of what technology has made possible, both in moving things online but also in gaining greater visibility into what’s available, even offline, and being able to set up events and run events. Everything that you could traditionally do from an educational standpoint, you can do more and faster now than used to be the case. Of course, we’ve seen learning evolve. Things are more trackable than they used to be. They’re more measurable. We know better what to track and what to measure.

Jeff Cobb: [00:12:10] In this employment market and just life in general these days, the need for learning and the need for knowing that your time is being invested wisely and you are getting that return has gone up significantly. And it is valued by people. We see this in our own surveying when we ask people about, when they decide to invest in paying for an educational opportunity, what are the things, what are the value factors that they’re weighing? One of the top three always is “Is this demonstrated to actually improve knowledge or skills? Is there some evidence that this is going to do something for me?” And then we know that employers are increasingly concerned about retention and that employees care about this stuff.

Celisa Steele: [00:12:51] LinkedIn does a workplace learning report. One from 2023 talked about the connection between employee retention and access to learning. That report from LinkedIn said that 93 percent of organizations are worried about employee retention. This is a real concern for the vast majority of organizations. And the number one way that organizations are working to improve retention is by providing learning opportunities.

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:19] Yes, I don’t think that’s something we’re going to see change anytime soon. It’s probably going to get more and more intense over time. We have this significant demand out there for learning—individuals, organizations, societies willing to invest in it. There is this expectation of return on it. Those two things alone, I think, are positive drivers for revenue. But I think one of the keep-people-up-at-night sides of revenue that will often spur organizations to figure out how do we generate more and how do we keep more is the underlying cost structures of delivering effective learning. And, if you’re going to generate revenue, if you’re going to generate positive net revenue, you have to have an eye on those underlying costs. That’s another element of the ways in which revenue flows here.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:07] That’s right. You need revenue, but then you need to further understand, okay, out of that revenue, what here is actually net positive? What is actually profit versus what is going to cover the costs that went into creating and maintaining and running these learning programs? In our experience, a lot of learning businesses don’t have really great insight into those underlying costs. It can get pretty tricky when you get into things like employee time against a particular offering in your portfolio. And so a lot of learning businesses don’t know quite how to allocate salaries against things in their portfolio. It can be a challenge to get to those accurate projections, to get to that accurate financial modeling, even on the portfolio level. But, by the time you begin trying to break it down into individual products or even product lines, then that begins to get a little bit murky for a lot of learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:05] This varies by the type of learning business that you are. Your average commercial training firm might be much more attuned to this than, say, an education department, or even be a quasi-education department, in, say, a small association where you’re part of a whole mix of other stuff and getting that level of clarity. But, increasingly, going back to some of the things we were saying about the expectation of return, the demand that’s out there, the competitive environment, if you’re going to be serious about revenue, you also have to be serious about this cost side and serious about accounting and finance, basically, and being able to roll up your sleeves and create projections and understand how the revenue is playing out within your learning business so that you do have visibility into “Is what we’re doing sustainable? Is this product line really worth continuing? If we’re going to introduce a new product line, what can we reasonably expect from that in terms of both gross and net revenue?” Your average education professional may not think of themselves as that financially attuned person, but, increasingly, if you’re in the learning business, and you need to generate revenue, and you need to be able to sustain that business, you’re going to have to be able to either do those things yourself or make sure you’ve got good people to do them.

Celisa Steele: [00:16:22] It’s another facet of return on investment. We were talking about the return on investment from the learner point of view, the employer point of view. What you’re getting at there, Jeff, is the return on investment from the learning business standpoint. Is this product line—whatever aspect of our portfolio—is that providing a return on our investment? And is it, to your point, sustainable and viable long term?

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:45] Definitely.

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:56] We’ve been talking about the ins and outs of revenue, being clear that the revenue is out there. There is the demand for what learning businesses offer. For me, the bottom line is that strong, positive net revenue is freedom. We deal with so many organizations that are feeling constrained. They’re feeling stressed. They’re reliant on a board of directors or some other part of the organization to give them enough budget to do what they need to do. They don’t feel like they can hire the staff they want. They don’t feel like they can invest in the way they want. When you have strong positive net revenue, those kinds of problems disappear. You’re in a position to invest appropriately in your learning business, and, by extension, you’re able to serve your learners in the way that probably every learning business wants to be able to serve their learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:17:55] We started out talking about revenue as a necessity, that learning businesses need it to survive. We talked about revenue as a reality, that education is being spent on, that there are lots of investment, lots of dollars being put against education. And then, Jeff, you just got to the opportunity. The opportunity is there that, if you can figure out the right approach to revenue and make sure that you’re getting the reach, the impact, and the revenue, then it’s opportunity. It gives you that freedom, as you were saying, to be able to do what you need to do to deliver on your mission as a learning business.

Celisa Steele: [00:18:39] While huge amounts of money are spent on continuing education, professional development, and other forms of lifelong learning, learning businesses often bump up against beliefs that education and learning should be free or low-cost enough to be accessible to all. That creates an interesting tension that we believe is better explored than ignored.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

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The post Education Revenue: Necessity, Reality, Opportunity appeared first on Leading Learning.

Heutagogy might be the most important and powerful idea in learning that you never heard mentioned on the Leading Learning Podcast. Until today. If a learning business embraces heutagogy, it will be well positioned to lead learning in the field, industry, or profession it serves because it will have enlisted the help of all learners.

In this episode, number 427, co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele talk about the emergence of heutagogy, its relationship to andragogy, and the potential it might represent for learning businesses.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:00] Heutagogy might be the most important and powerful idea in learning that you’ve never heard us mention. Until today.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:12] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:14] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:22] If you’ve tuned in before, odds are pretty good that you’ve heard us talk about andragogy.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:27] And odds are pretty good that you’ve also heard us talk about self-directed learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:32] But we are absolutely, 100-percent sure you have never heard us talk about heutagogy, and that’s a gap we want to address in today’s episode, number 427.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:43] Because, despite our lack of use of the term hithertofore, we are proponents of and believers of heutagogy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:52] And we want to make sure that you are going to be a believer too. So let’s dig into this term and figure out what heutagogy is. Celisa, you were the one who uncovered this gem for us.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:04] It’s a term that was coined by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon, and it was used in an article that they published in 2000, and that article was called “From Andragogy to Heutagogy.” They define, in that article, heutagogy as “the study of self-determined learning.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:21] As that title suggests, the authors are definitely building on the work of Malcolm Knowles and crediting him with the shift in 1970 away from pedagogy, which has that kid focus, to andragogy, which is for adult learners.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:40] So why heutagogy? There’s a cynical view of that, which is just that, hey, a new word gets attention. You coin a new word, and that’s going to help you get out there and get your article published. That’s the cynical take on it.

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:53] It’s an important thing to do if you are a researching academic sort. You have that whole “publish or perish” hanging over you. But I think we can take a little bit more generous view and say basically what Hase and Kenyon say is that, while andragogy was a good step, it just wasn’t far enough. It’s still too focused on a teacher-student relationship and too grounded in a reality that’s no longer true. You can think about how much the world has changed or had changed since Knowles published The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy Versus Pedagogy in 1970.

Celisa Steele: [00:02:33] Right. So you have Knowles publishing The Modern Practice of Adult Education, 1970. Hase and Kenyon, it’s 2000, so 30 years later, where they’re publishing “From Andragogy to Heutagogy.” As you said, a lot changed in those 30 years. Well, it’s been not quite 30 years since Hase and Kenyon put out their article, but here we are in 2024. So it’s been 24 years. We can think about how much has changed even since 2000. COVID, generative AI, the decline in the trust of expertise—those are just a few that I can tick off fairly readily about things that have changed in the world in which we work and live.

Jeff Cobb: [00:03:11] Even before that, in 2000, what had happened with technology since Knowles was writing, lifespan, what work and jobs and careers looked like even then and certainly what they look like now—just a lot had changed since his initial idea of andragogy was put out there.

Celisa Steele: [00:03:29] In short, I think that we believe that Hase and Kenyon were really on to something with this idea of “Let’s move beyond andragogy,” and we’ll go along with what they call it, heutagogy. One of the things that they point out is, given all that’s changed and given the pace of change, the accelerating pace of change, is that andragogy is still probably too focused on formal learning. Hase and Kenyon point to what they call “the value of everyday, unorganized experiences and the process of reflection.” That’s what we might call informal learning.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:04] Yes. Hase and Kenyon say that “heutagogy looks to the future in which knowing how to learn will be a fundamental skill given the pace of innovation and the changing structures of communities and workplaces.” I can hear echoes in that of Alvin Toffler, of Peter Drucker. People have been thinking about this type of thing before, but Hase and Kenyon formalized that a bit.

Celisa Steele: [00:04:29] Yes, and I think that part of what they’re doing in their formulation of heutagogy is forefronting learners’ motivation and effort and ability, and it downplays the teacher or the instructor—and possibly even the learning business if it’s less important what’s going on in a formal sense. A lot of learning businesses are really focused on creating and delivering what falls under that formal learning umbrella—courses, seminars, and conferences. It, to some extent, perhaps threatens what a learning business does. Or maybe not.

Jeff Cobb: [00:05:06] Yes. We’ve raised this possibility before, and I think we definitely can talk about it more in this episode. But, if you think about it in the extreme, we really can’t ever teach others. It really comes down to the learner in the end. And we’ve talked before about concepts of learner responsibility and what the behavior, what the motivation of the learner has to be if learning is actually going to happen. Really, what a teacher can do and what a learning business can help to facilitate through providing structure, instructors, and that sort of thing is stimulate and encourage others to learn.

Celisa Steele: [00:05:45] Yes. I think, as we’ve already begun to allude to in our conversation so far, really heutagogy is a new name, an umbrella term for a lot of other ideas floating around. And Hase and Kenyon do give due to some of those other ideas that they’re building off of when they formulate heutagogy. Things like systems thinking and organizational learning and learner-managed learning and action learning and work-based learning. There are a lot of these various trends that they believe are tributaries flowing into the way that they describe and define heutagogy.

Jeff Cobb: [00:06:22] Yes, the classic “standing on the shoulders of giants” sort of thing and taking some of this thinking and, again, putting some structure, putting some formalization around it. Of course, heutagogy does build on andragogy. I’ll dip into a little bit of what they say about that in the paper. They say that “Knowles’ definition [of self-directed learning] provides a linear approach to learning and sounds like the chapters of a train the trainer guide”—very, very much rooted in traditional concepts of training and education. On the other hand, “Heutagogy takes account of intuition and concepts such as ‘double loop learning’ [Chris Argyris] that are not linear and not necessarily planned.”

Celisa Steele: [00:07:06] “It may be that a person doesn’t identify a learning need” per se. They might not be super clear on what their learning need is, but they can identify “the potential to learn from a novel experience.” Again, this is this idea of you want to have learning that is as adaptable and applicable in as many situations as possible, and that’s where heutagogy is focusing. As they describe it—they being Hase and Kenyon in this article—they talk about it as including “aspects of capability, action learning processes such as reflection, environmental scanning as understood in Systems Theory, and valuing experience and interaction with others.” In essence, heutagogy “goes beyond problem solving” because it enables productivity. Or actually, “proactivity” is what they say, not productivity. Both, I think, are actually true, but it is this focus on what can be done with learning, which may be greater than any sort of learning objectives anyone might ascribe to a particular course.

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:17] I don’t know that their language necessarily mirrors this; maybe I’m adding my own gloss on it, but I’m thinking about proactivity and thinking about how they’re treating learning. We’ve talked before about how a great deal of learning can be unconscious. A great deal of learning doesn’t necessarily have intentionality behind it. This is another one of those approaches that gives us some language and some tools for helping to raise things to consciousness, helping to raise things to intentionality. Potentially, this is a point of leverage that we can use in engaging with our learners and helping them understand themselves as learners better and how they can learn better, even when they’re not in that classroom or that conference situation. We all box ourselves in so much and see ourselves as not really learning unless we’re in those formal learning structures. This is an approach that says, yes, you’re learning in those structures, obviously, but there’s so much that they can happen on a self-directed basis.

Jeff Cobb: [00:09:22] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:58] And so all of this points to a potential opportunity for learning businesses. A potential heutagogical opportunity…

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:06] Heutagogical opportunity!

Celisa Steele: [00:10:07] …for learning businesses.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:08] You heard it here first.

Celisa Steele: [00:10:10] I think, just as you were describing, Jeff, if a learning business can really support learners in being self-directed, there’s a lot of potential opportunity because that very much could distinguish you from other learning providers that are just providing the course or the conference or that construct but aren’t necessarily helping to develop your capability to learn.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:35] Yes. I think that truly learner-centric approach is a real fit for many learning businesses. Associations, of course, have their memberships, their communities, and thinking about people operating and learning within that community—not so much within a classroom or a conference per se—and thinking about how you can leverage that. Even if you’re in an academic continuing education unit, you’ve got a little more latitude, a little more freedom than you do if you’re within the confines of that accredited degree path structure that the rest of the institution has to operate within. How do you take advantage of that and start being that facilitative structure around the learning needs of your learners that they can potentially take hold of themselves and direct themselves in?

Celisa Steele: [00:11:20] We’ve talked about developing pathways and trying to help smooth the path for your learners by making it clear what a next step might be. All of that is great, and we do believe that is a value that a learning business can provide. But this is about going beyond pathways. This is really about how do you help someone almost create their own pathway, which might be something that you never imagined. But, again, you’re helping to facilitate and equip them with the skills that are going to actually allow them to identify “What is the right pathway for me?” and figure out how to get where they would like to be.

Jeff Cobb: [00:11:56] Yes, I think there’s a comparison to how creativity works in here—you’ll often hear that creativity and innovation work best within constraints. You provide a framework within which people can operate, but then they’re driving the bus. But you’re also providing them with a launch pad because they get used to being creative within these structures and can ultimately…. Picasso goes from being the classic painter to, well, being what he’s known for today. I can think of an analogy in learning. We need to set these guardrails up. Pathways are valuable. But then how are we empowering people to go off the path and go where they need to go with their learning?

Celisa Steele: [00:12:33] One point that I find particularly interesting from the Hase and Kenyon article is that they really focus on capacity. Again, if we think about pathways and certifications, they’re arguing that it’s really not about competency. It’s about capacity. And so this is a quote from their article: “Capable people are those who: know how to learn; are creative; have a high degree of self-efficacy; can apply competencies in novel as well as familiar situations; and can work well with others. In comparison with competencies which consist of knowledge and skills, capability is a holistic attribute. Developing capable people requires innovative approaches to learning consistent with the concept of heutagogy.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:13:20] Yes, I like that. We have an article that’s from quite a while back, but it’s still one of the most popular articles on our Mission to Learn site. It’s about 15 ways of the self-directed learner, and a lot of this language from Hase and Kenyon reflects that. It’s similar sort of language. What are the attitudes and the behaviors of that sort of learner? And then, again, back to learning businesses, how can we help people unlock those and actualize them?

Celisa Steele: [00:13:44] I think that one of the challenges in unlocking that will be a willingness to relinquish some control and some power. If the idea is about letting that learner be self-directed, that means you don’t really know where they’re going. You don’t really know what they’re going to do with the materials that you put out there. And so it’s a little bit at odds with the way so many organizations are created. We want to have a bit of control and even some power and say in what people are going to do and how they’re going to make use of our products and services. And this suggests that we might have to let go of that.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:20] Yes, it doesn’t lend itself very well to smile sheets or standard approaches to assessment or certification, but this is fertile ground for talking about how we might use some alternative approaches to those things. How will we measure impact if this is the sort of environment that we’re supporting for our learners? I don’t think that’s impossible. I think there are valid ways to do that, but it is going to require learning business leaders to think a bit differently.

Celisa Steele: [00:14:48] And we’ve been focused a lot on the idea of personalized learning. What can we do to get there? I think this takes it one step further. This is individualized learning. It is that individual learner getting to say, “Okay, this is what and how I learn.”

Jeff Cobb: [00:15:12] Heutagogy might be the most important and powerful idea in learning that you’ve never heard us mention. Until today. If your learning business embraces heutagogy, it will be well positioned to lead learning in the field, industry, or profession you serve because you’ll have enlisted the help of all your learners.

To make sure you don’t miss new episodes, we encourage you to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). Subscribing also gives us some data on the impact of the podcast.

We’d also be grateful if you would take a minute to rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We personally appreciate reviews and ratings, and they help us show up when people search for content on leading a learning business.

Finally, consider following us and sharing the good word about Leading Learning. You can find us on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The post Heutagogical Opportunity? appeared first on Leading Learning.

In the U.S., higher education institutions are increasingly interested in serving nontraditional students, in providing credentials beyond degrees, and in using online learning to extend their reach beyond physical campuses. As those changes happen in higher ed, ripples are created that impact the learning business landscape.

Luke Dowden is the chief online learning officer at the Alamo Colleges District, located in San Antonio, Texas. In this episode, number 426, Luke talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb about the good and the bad of online learning becoming an established part of higher education, digital credentialing, non-credit offerings, credit for prior learning, and partnerships between higher education and other organizations serving the third sector.

To tune in, listen below. To make sure you catch all future episodes, be sure to subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, iHeartRadio, PodBean, or any podcatcher service you may use (e.g., Overcast). And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet.

Download a PDF transcript of this episode’s audio.

Luke Dowden: [00:00:00] It’s not training for the sake of training. It’s not education for the sake of education. But it helps that learner gain some kind of economic or social mobility that they are desiring.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:14] I’m Celisa Steele.

Jeff Cobb: [00:00:15] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:23] In the U.S., higher education institutions are increasingly interested in serving nontraditional students, in providing credentials beyond degrees, and in using online learning to extend their reach beyond physical campuses. As those changes happen in higher ed, ripples are created that impact the learning business landscape.

Celisa Steele: [00:00:44] Luke Dowden is the chief online learning officer at the Alamo Colleges District, located in San Antonio, Texas. Texas is the eighth largest economy in the world, and San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the U.S. but, unfortunately, has the highest rate of urban poverty in the country. The chancellor has established a moonshot for the Alamo Colleges District to partner to end poverty through education and training.

Celisa Steele: [00:01:12] In this episode, number 426, Luke talks about the good and the bad of online learning becoming an established part of higher education, and he cites online learning’s promise of access and agency while not ignoring questions of quality and connectedness. Jeff and Luke also talk about digital credentialing, non-credit offerings, credit for prior learning, and partnerships between higher education and other organizations serving the third sector. Luke points out that competition for attention is often the fiercest competition any learning provider faces. We hope you’ll give your attention to Jeff and Luke’s conversation, which took place in July 2024.

Jeff Cobb: [00:02:05] Your title is chief online learning officer. A couple questions related to that. What is that title in and of itself? A decade or more ago that did not exist as a title, I’m sure. How common do you find that as a title now in your world? Do you have a lot of peers who have that same sort of title?

Luke Dowden: [00:02:25] They do, or they have adjacent titles. You might have associate or assistant provosts of online learning. You may have vice presidents of online and extended education. It’s definitely a top title that’s emerged in the last seven or eight years. For a long time, there were directors of online learning, directors of distance learning. But as more and more institutions adopted online learning—and this has been nice to be in the industry and see this emerge—you’ve seen titles that indicate a strategic nature behind them. It’s not just the operations. For those of us that have been in online learning for over 15, 20 years, there’s a deep set of operational acumen that you need to run a successful distance, online, extended learning program. This elevation of chief or vice provosts or vice presidents of online learning really signals the strategic importance to an institution.

Luke Dowden: [00:03:21] Certainly for us, the Alamo Colleges District, of those 72,000 students, Jeff, almost 16,000 were fully online this past fall. So you can see just for our organization, but, if you look at some of the other trends in the iPads’ data, you can see the growth of online learning. And this was before COVID. A lot of people, and rightfully so, we did see a number of institutions realize the benefit of having an online learning platform. We were fortunate. We were already pretty heavily invested in the infrastructure that you need—not just the technology but the people and the training of faculty—before COVID, so that we could really tap into those resources. But hopefully that answers your question in terms of the emergence of that title. It definitely is a phenomenon. For your listeners, Quality Matters is an organization that partners on a report called “The Changing Landscape of Online Education” (CHLOE). The CHLOE report has been tracking the changes over time and the emergence of chief online learning officers. There’s a researcher that has been tracking these roles for quite some time.

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] That relates to my second question because obviously, at this point, online learning is an established fact in higher education. It was before COVID, as you said, and then COVID kicked things up several notches. But an institution really can’t exist without thinking about online learning at this point. You’ve been doing this long enough; you’ve seen the rise of online as a part of higher education. What do you see as the good of that? This is the good, bad, and ugly question around online learning becoming an established part of higher education.

Luke Dowden: [00:05:09] I just want to be fair to your listeners. The majority of my career has been in online learning. I know that I said that earlier. I don’t consider myself an evangelist. I’ll say that very quickly I’m as much a champion as I am a critic of online learning. I think the good is about access, and I want to also be clear that I’m not just speaking to my experience now in San Antonio. I founded an office of distance learning at a Research 1 in Louisiana, and I worked at a small urban community college. I worked at a regional university where I did some recruiting for graduate and adult programs. So, when I respond to your good, bad, and ugly question, Jeff, I’m really bringing in all of that experience.

Luke Dowden: [00:05:50] The good is access. For some learners, learning is education support. They’ve got family, job, taking care of parents. I talk to a lot of my colleagues and even some learners now that are part of the sandwich generation that are raising their kids, but they’re also taking care of parents, or they have other extended family members that they’re taking care of. So, for me, the good is the access. And some of that is democratizing learning. There are a lot of learners that might feel lost in a big lecture classroom, so there’s a sense of agency that I think online learning gives you. We definitely heard more and more from students that participate in learning in a different way because they can do it on their own time, but they’re also finding agency and voice. Those are the good things.

Luke Dowden: [00:06:36] From a personal experience, I first received distance learning as a high school student. I wanted Spanish, and the only way to get it was in a little telephone box and a TV training. You and I are recording on Zoom where it’s a lot more synchronous. You could hear them, but there was a delay in the video—that was before compressed video, before asynchronous online learning. But that’s how I got Spanish. Spanish I and Spanish II. It was ported in from a university an hour away to my little, small, rural school. So I even think about rural learners that we serve in online learning across the United States.

Luke Dowden: [00:07:13] The bad for us—that’s deficit language in my current environment, so we would say “opportunities for improvement”—I think quality assurance. I spoke to the CHLOE report earlier, but what I would tell you is, in the 2022 report…. This is a statement that I want to read because I think it’s important, that underscores why I said quality assurance is an opportunity for improvement. Almost all institutions in the CHLOE sample (96%) had adopted quality online standards. So having online standards and the adoption runs pretty high. But there are major shortcomings in the quality assurance (QA) process of those schools that were surveyed. And it comes from a lot of different areas.

Luke Dowden: [00:07:52] Are faculty designing courses on their own? Are they designing them with an instructional designer? Are they co-designed together? Are they giving courses that are well-designed? How are faculty prepared? What’s the wrap-around support for students? I think that’s another area where we’ve put some significant energy here. So that’s one. I think the other is understanding the needs of the online learner. Just because they’re learning online doesn’t mean they don’t want to be a part of a community. And we’ve been fortunate. The discussion around mental health and the need to support mental health of not just learners but people in our society. We’ve also started to focus, in online learning, on belonging and connectedness, and what are ways that we can create—if it’s through a technology platform or through some group, some other technology-mediated way of connecting people within majors?

Luke Dowden: [00:08:46] And I’ll speak a little bit about being a parent. I have a son that is one of our community college students and a graduate who talked about the importance of being connected to people in their programs and majors. That’s another area that we can always improve and then connecting those learners to the opportunity they’re seeking. And what we may think is completion—what we’re judged on is completion—it may look very different for them. Completing a course may be the goal for that learner. So understanding their goals as well is another area. Hopefully, that’s helpful to your listeners.

Celisa Steele: [00:09:26] At Tagoras, we partner with professional and trade associations, continuing education units, training firms, and other learning businesses to help them to understand market realities and potential, to connect better with existing customers and find new ones, and to make smart investment decisions around product development and portfolio management. Drawing on our expertise in lifelong learning, market assessment, and strategy formulation, we can help you achieve greater reach, revenue, and impact. Learn more at tagoras.com/more.

Jeff Cobb: [00:10:05] Very with often online learning, and I think even face-to-face these days, colleges are often not serving what we think of as the traditional college and university students anymore. In fact, those are actually in the minority at this point. Whether online or off, I’d love your perspective on how well higher education is rising to that challenge of looking beyond the stereotypical traditional learner and serving the lifelong learner. What are some of the main challenges they’re facing with that?

Luke Dowden: [00:10:38] I’m, again, being open about my bias. I think community colleges in Texas are doing an excellent job. I think we have the policy construct in place. Many know about House Bill 8—that is our state’s move to fund community colleges based on performance. We have incentives, Jeff, in place to better serve and serve more economically disadvantaged, academically disadvantaged, and adults 25+. There is a connectivity to the business community and the focus on business and industry and their needs. In terms of a sector in higher education that I think has a lot of promise and is doing a good job, I certainly think it’s community colleges. It doesn’t mean that others aren’t needed. We need different types of institutions for different types of learners, and I don’t think we talk enough about that in some of the narratives and the dialog. I have a lot of respect for private institutions and the liberal arts and what they provide. I have a child that is in that learning environment while I have another child that needed the community college and wanted the hands-on and wanted to be able to work and learn at the same time, as we think about work-based learning. We need different types of institutions for different types of learners.

Luke Dowden: [00:11:57] You ask about the challenges faced. I think understanding the market, that’s something that I’ve watched different organizations struggle with. Do they really understand the market that they’re serving? And then will you adapt the delivery in a fast enough method that you can serve more of the market? Meaning that, “Well, should we just always offer them in sixteen weeks, or could it be eight weeks?” One of the institutions I was at, I said, “We want to do what we do in the summer, twice in the fall and twice in the spring,” and people looked at me funny because we would have an eight-week session in the summer and two four-week sessions. I said, “We just want to do what we do in the summer, twice in the fall and twice in the spring.” And I said that enough that, when I had left that organization, that’s what they were doing. You can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean by that is create the conditions that you are doing something, but you’re maybe doing it over here, and you need to think about your calendar or how you’ll approach the rhythm or the different options and the different configurations of learning.

Luke Dowden: [00:13:02] In Oklahoma one time, there were 52 Tuesdays. So, 52 Tuesdays, if you come, you can earn your degree. And so I still think that there are those opportunities to improve. A couple of the other challenges to your original question of adapting and understanding the market is you do have people that stop in and out. When you work with folks that are learners, that learning is not going to be the first priority because of other priorities in their lives. Then you have to create a way for them to come back in easily. A lot of the work that I did at the last institution in Louisiana was around designing for people to stop out, expecting that, and creating pathways for them to come back in. And the hardest part is that there’s a lot of competition for people’s attention. We’re competing for attention. You’re not just competing against an online competitor or another brick-and-mortar competitor, but you’re creating an experience. Think about the things that we like to go and spend money and time on. I would say that people are very mindful of the experience they want, the expectations they’re coming in with. I think there’s also a new set of expectations that learners are bringing with them, based on what they’re experiencing with other services.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:24] Yes, I do think that we often talk about that, that competition for attention—not just being in competition with other providers, other businesses—and also that whole issue of really understanding your market because organizations do struggle with that, understandably, but it is something that most need to put more effort into.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:40] You and I met originally because we were on a panel about digital credentials, microcredentials, alternative credentials, not necessarily your traditional degree. I want to have a little bit of conversation with you about that. What’s your perspective at this point on digital credentials? There seems to be a lot of buzz out there about it, particularly in the higher-education world. How much potential are you seeing in that at this point? And what are you seeing as the main challenges to them truly going mainstream?

Luke Dowden: [00:15:13] There’s been a long history of continuing ed in this country, and digital credentials and microcredentials in many ways are an extension of that. I want to lend appreciation to the history that we’ve had—good, bad, indifferent—around continuing professional education because that is a field that has been well established. But it’s always been to the side and not in the mainstream of higher education. But digital credentials and microcredentials have really pushed themselves into the mainstream. Are they mainstream yet? No. Do they garner a lot of attention? Yes. For me, for them to become mainstream, the organizations like mine…I’m very proud of our approach and others that really put learners at the center of what we’re trying to accomplish with microcredentials, digital credentials, alternate credentials, whatever you want to call them.

Luke Dowden: [00:16:04] We understand learners are struggling in the job market to articulate the skills they have, to quickly upskill and develop new skills, and to have evidence of skills. To the extent that digital credentials help someone provide evidence of something they have, realize a skill that they have, or gain a new skill, they’re going to become important. But I think it’s important to talk about the learner and the benefit to the learner, and then their connectedness to whatever job or next learning opportunity that it’s going to go to.

Luke Dowden: [00:16:34] We reached a point in our work there…we had started with digital badges around marketable skills because companies kept saying people don’t have oral communication, written communication, critical thinking, teamwork collaboration. Those were the top, regardless of industry. It didn’t matter if it was advanced manufacturing, IT, healthcare, it was the same list. So we started there.

Luke Dowden: [00:16:57] But we reached a point where we had to stop talking about badges. We still will report numbers, but we had to talk about skills because skills were what mattered to the learner and what mattered to the employer. To the extent that we stay focused on skills—and the badge or the microcredential, the professional certificate doesn’t become the thing—then I think that’s where we’ll realize the potential. The challenge, though, is that the technology is still emerging around badging and pathways, skills, wallets, comprehensive learner records, and ecosystems. It’s dizzying. It’s dizzying for us that are in that ecosystem and for learners trying to navigate, “What platform do I put my information on?” And will that be consumed by human resources information systems, which are significant barriers to digital credential adoption? We know that. I believe the first human resource information system that has large-scale adoption, that really starts to ingest these types of records, that will be the game changer for us.

Luke Dowden: [00:18:05] Conversely, we know this from spending time with SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, the majority of companies in the United States are not very large companies. They’re not. They’re small companies who may not have a human resource information system at all. How will they value digital credentials? Again, we’re fortunate that SHRM, that serves a medium to a smaller business, is involved in this work. But I think there are lots of challenges to adoption—not to mention the language that we use. We’ve got a new set of words around upskilling, reskilling, short-term training, digital credentials, digital wallet that, in our work…and we were fortunate. We worked with chambers of commerce that said, “Luke, we don’t care what you call it, but, whatever you call it, you have to explain it to us.” For higher-ed organizations or any organization, especially those that you work with, Jeff, the language is important, and you have to own the need to educate people about it. Hopefully, in that response—and I know it’s a little long-winded—you can see the layered set of challenges with digital credentials being mainstreamed.

Jeff Cobb: [00:19:14] Yes, definitely. I hear you and appreciate the challenge on the employer side of being able to make use of those credentials in a scalable way. That is going to change things once we do finally tip on that. On the higher-education side, you can tell me how much this is connected or not because you’re more ensconced in this world than I am, but we find, particularly when we’re talking with some of our association clients, and they want to work with higher education, they always run into issues because, if they’re dealing with an accredited institution that’s going to grant credit for a learning experience, that’s automatically a stumbling block. It slows things down that something has to go through this system, where you’re going to earn credit for the learning opportunity. Are you seeing more openness to or focus on non-credit learning opportunities in higher education, and those potentially being reflected in digital credentials? To what extent do you see those connected or not? And, regardless, is there more openness now to non-credit-type activity in the higher education world?

Luke Dowden: [00:20:19] I think it depends on what group of higher-education employees you talk to. By faculty, it varies, at type of institution, by discipline, by part of the country. It varies. Staff members, the same way. I would say here, for where I am now, I’m proud our organization’s realized we needed a much more robust set of credit-for-prior-learning procedures. We had an entire group of deans that worked on those. Then you have a set of processes that make it easier for learners, especially our veterans, to say, “Hey, I’d like you to evaluate my learning.” This credit for experience is a misnomer. That’s talking about terms. We’re engaged in credit for prior learning. So I would say I don’t know that I’ve seen a change.

Luke Dowden: [00:21:13] I know that, if you do work in digital credentials, you recognize very quickly you need robust credit-for-prior-learning procedures, practices, policies, and systems so that you can help move that learning. I do think there is a greater recognition of this false wall that we put between non-credit and credit. It’s learning. How do we value that to keep people moving towards credentials? Credential attainment is important. You know this, Jeff, and I know this, but you ask any economist, or you look at the Center on Education and the Workforce, and they will show you the lifetime earnings of someone with more credentials over time. And, of course, it’s even greater in certain disciplines—business, engineering, computer science, etc. But, still, the difference in someone with an associate’s degree and their lifetime earnings over someone with a high school diploma is, in a conservative nature, around a half a million dollars. And then it grows from there.

Luke Dowden: [00:22:15] Credentials are important. They are. And the half-life of skills. You and I both know there’s a constant need to replenish your skills because technology takes care of that skill that you had—it serves that purpose—and you need to recalibrate your own self-worth and your own ability to function in a new environment with a set of new realities. I know that’s a long answer to that question, but it’s some things that I think about in this interconnectedness of the credential and the acceptance of learning. I hope we break that, we stop talking about non-credit and credit at some point. We’re not there. I do think there are organizations that are certainly moving in that direction, and those will be the organizations that survive the enrollment cliff that many of our colleges and universities in the country are facing.

Jeff Cobb: [00:23:19] I do a lot of my work in the trade and professional association world, and one thing I’ve been increasingly interested in and trying to find connections in is how those worlds might work together productively: higher education and associations. I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to ask somebody like yourself your perspective on that. Do you see opportunities for collaboration between higher education and trade and professional associations?

Luke Dowden: [00:23:46] I do, but I think it’s all about a shared set of values. Do you have a shared set of values around learners and learning? I think there’s an opportunity to discuss that and determine that. Do you see a need where you can help stimulate, create, expand talent pipelines? Our country needs more talent to field high-demand, high-wage jobs. To the extent that a professional association and higher education (community college, four-year university, even standalone graduate school programs) can band together to supercharge a talent pipeline for an industry, like semiconductors or any kind of other advanced manufacturing, I think there’s an opportunity, but I think it’s around understanding the pathway. Can we help create a pathway? Can we bring the curriculum and the learning design? Can you bring the wrap-around support? Because, when you begin to serve different type of learners….

Luke Dowden: [00:24:45] We haven’t talked about segments within the adult learning population. They’ve got different needs. They have transportation needs. They have drop-in childcare needs. I think there’s a great need to re-imagine partnerships that serve the whole person, that get them trained and into the talent pipeline. I see great opportunity there. And you need all types of organizations. You need intermediaries. You need businesses that are at the table. You need some foundations that can invest. Maybe there are federal grants or state grants. I live in the world of possibility. I think things are possible, but you don’t want to lose the focus on the learner. What are we trying to help that learner accomplish? And then how are we contributing to the greater good of society? Hopefully that doesn’t sound too Pollyanna-ish for your audience, but I think that you have to look for areas where the right partner, the right time. We’ve certainly had those experiences where totally right partner, right time, and it’s worked.

Jeff Cobb: [00:25:46] Right. I like that you want to focus on possibility. That’s not Pollyanna at all. It does obviously suggest the future, what’s out there in the future, so I don’t want to have you leave the conversation without getting a little of your perspective on the future. What has you most excited now, when you do look out at the horizon, what’s going on, and you think about what is possible for colleges, universities, continued education out there in the future?

Luke Dowden: [00:26:12] I think there’s an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves, and it’s not a far leap. I think it’s getting into the delivery mechanisms working. It’s moving from just descriptive explanation of who, what, when. But how do we analyze the data that we have on learners and then apply that to improving the learning experience? I think there are some organizations that are doing that really well. As companies move to a skills-based hiring—we know that’s still nascent—but there are significant organizations, Walmart, of course, that are involved, investing, and bringing others to the table around hiring based on skills, and how we adjust to ensure that our learners, whatever credential we award, can speak to their skills? They can tell you the level that they have that skill. They can give you examples, and they’ve got some documentation to back it up. I’m excited about that type of learning design.

Luke Dowden: [00:27:13] But learning design just interests me in general and then the use of design thinking. Do we go through these cycles where we iterate on a learning experience and continue to improve it? But it’s really about scale. And the thing that I do have to credit Alamo with is we think about scale here, and how do we serve more and open up more pipelines, Jeff? What excites me is can it help someone get an entry-level, family-sustaining-wage job that then allows them to grow inside of the company? It’s not a dead-end job; it’s an entry-level, family-sustaining-wage job that then opens up possibilities for that learner. It opens up benefits. It opens up the opportunity for their learning to be paid for by the company or even training inside of the company. That excites me. That excites me for an individual that I may never meet, you may never meet, to benefit from something that we can create by focusing and listening to them and providing training that does just that. It’s not training for the sake of training. It’s not education for the sake of education. But it helps that learner gain some kind of economic or social mobility that they are desiring.

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:32] What about you as a learner? Switching gears a little bit, we do always like to ask guests about their own approaches to lifelong learning. So do you have specific habits or practices, maybe favorite resources that you’d be willing to share?

Luke Dowden: [00:28:46] I get a lot of learning from LinkedIn. I’m not an influencer. I don’t get paid by LinkedIn, but I really enjoy watching what others are engaged in. From time to time, I enjoy participating on panels, Jeff; that’s how we met. I get to expand my network. I like that. I’m a connector, and so I like to expand my network. I learn by what others are doing. There are times where I’ll just deep dive on a topic—like I’m about to deep dive on artificial intelligence, spend a lot of time there thinking about it. But a lot of my learning is with engaging. I’m not consistent. My learning style will flip. A couple of years ago, I was heavy into podcasts. I feel myself entering that learning again because I’m in the car a lot. But those are really it. It’s definitely through professional associations and engaging in conferences and panels, as traditional as that sounds. Like I said, yes, I’m a chief online learning officer, and I still like to see people face to face, but I think podcasts are important. I think connecting and networking with people on LinkedIn. And then just engaging with my colleagues here, being present when people are presenting, and learning so much that I can about the field of education, definitely community colleges, I maintain a strong interest in.

Celisa Steele: [00:30:12] Luke Dowden is the chief online learning officer at the Alamo Colleges District. Learn more about how the district approaches online learning. They have also created six insight briefs that share their journey to elevate training options since introducing microcredentials, and that could be a great source if you’re considering adding or elevating microcredentials as part of your learning business’s portfolio.

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