The usual response is predictable: more topics, more formats, more discounts.

None of that gets at the real issue, which is demand. Not “How do we get more people to sign up for our webinars?” but “What are the problems and ambitions that actually matter to them – and where are those problems still poorly served?”

That’s where latent demand lives. And most learning businesses never really look for it.

What follows is a practical way to do that work. While the focus is primarily on markets like CME, CLE, and CPE where the obvious demand has already been strip-mined, everything here applies to any learning business trying to deal with weak or declining demand for its offerings – you’ll just need to do a modest (and valuable) amount of work to translate examples into your own situation.

Demand hides in jobs, not topics

When people talk about “what the market wants,” they usually mean topics:

• “Our members want more AI.”
• “People are asking for [flavor of the month] content.”
• “Soft skills are hot right now.”

That’s not demand. That’s noise.

The useful unit of analysis is the job people are trying to get done in their professional lives. Not their job title, but the underlying “I need to…” that’s driving behavior.

For example, a physician might be trying to:

• Stay out of trouble with regulators and malpractice insurers.
• Keep up with changes in guidelines without spending every weekend reading journals.
• Move from a purely clinical role into leadership.

An accountant might be trying to:

• Shift their book of business from low-margin compliance work to higher-margin advisory.
• Use AI to increase throughput without risking confidentiality or running afoul of professional standards.
• Keep clients calm and informed as regulations and reporting expectations shift.

“Get CME credits” or “get CPE hours” is one job. It’s also the most commoditized job in the entire ecosystem. If your discovery process begins and ends there, you will stay stuck in a low-value race.

The starting point for uncovering hidden demand is simply changing the question from:

• “What topics do you want next year?”

to:

• “What are you actually trying to accomplish in your work that learning could help with – even if you wouldn’t normally call it ‘education’?”

Listen for anxiety and workarounds, not wish lists

Once you shift from topics to jobs, the next step is to listen differently.

Most organizations already “listen” through:

• Periodic topic polling
• Open-ended questions at the end of course evaluations
• A few vocal volunteers who always have opinions

That kind of listening is fine if you want incremental improvements (or, more often, hit-or-miss program). It rarely surfaces latent demand.

You get much richer insight by asking people to walk you through specific situations:

• “Tell me about the last time you felt behind – on a regulation, a technology, a clinical issue. What did you do?”
• “Walk me through the last time you were scrambling to meet CE requirements. How did that play out?”
• “Think about a time you felt exposed – legally, reputationally, financially – and realized you needed to learn something fast. What happened?”

In those stories, you’re listening for:

• Jobs – the recurring “I need to…” patterns that show up across people and settings.
• Outcomes – what “success” looks like in their own terms.
• Workarounds – the cobbled-together solutions they rely on now (YouTube, internal wikis, vendor materials, AI tools, the one colleague who actually reads the regs).
• Anxieties – where people feel genuine risk or opportunity, not just mild curiosity.

When you hear a physician say, “I mostly just ask the rep and hope for the best,” or an accountant say, “I copied a template I found online and prayed it would pass muster,” that’s the sound of demand. Not for another one-hour webinar, but for something that actually reduces risk or increases performance.

You won’t get that from a checkbox survey.

Ask a few better questions at scale

Qualitative interviews are essential, but at some point, you need to move beyond anecdotes. That doesn’t require an elaborate study. It just requires asking better questions of a broader group.

Most continuing education surveys look like this:

• Which of the following topics interest you?
• How likely are you to attend a course on X, Y, Z?

Those questions tell you what people are willing to click on. They do not tell you where demand is strongest.

A more useful approach starts by translating what you heard in interviews into outcome statements, then asking people to rate each one on two dimensions: importance and how well it’s being met today.

For example:

• “Minimize the time it takes me to translate new guidelines into what I actually do day-to-day.”
• “Reduce the risk that my use of AI tools will be judged unprofessional or non-compliant.”
• “Increase the share of my work that is higher-margin advisory rather than low-margin compliance.”
• “Reduce the stress and uncertainty I feel when my CE records are audited.”

For each, you ask:

• How important is this to you in your work? (1–10)
• How satisfied are you with how well this is handled today? (1–10)

Where you see “very important” and “poorly handled,” you’re looking at unmet demand.

You’ll almost always find that:

• Credits themselves are medium-importance and reasonably well served.
• Risk, performance, and transition issues (into leadership, into advisory, into AI-enabled practice) are high-importance and unevenly served at best.

Those are the cracks where a new kind of offer can wedge itself in.

If your next “needs assessment” is just a list of topics with Likert scales, ignore whatever it tells you. It’s not measuring what matters.

Scan the edges of your market

Two groups are especially interesting if you’re hunting for non-obvious demand:

1. People already living in the future
2. People who barely buy from you – or not at all

The first group are the ones who are already experimenting with things everyone else is just talking about:

• The practice that has built its own internal AI guidelines and workflows.
• The firm that has aggressively automated basic compliance and now treats CPE as a strategic investment in advisory capabilities.
• The professional who is visibly out in front on climate, ESG, or other emerging risk areas.

They’ve had to solve problems before the rest of the market even noticed those problems existed.

Ask them:

• “What have you had to figure out that nobody helped you with?”
• “What did you build for your team that others keep asking you about?”
• “Where do you feel pain now that you suspect others will feel in a couple of years?”

The second group – noncustomers and minimal customers – are the people who prove that your current offers aren’t as essential as you’d like to believe:

• Professionals who meet requirements using free or ultra-cheap sources.
• Employers who have built their own internal training and send people to you only when they have to.
• Younger professionals who engage with online communities, YouTube, and AI tools, but never quite get around to joining or buying.

Ask them:

• “When you really need to get up to speed on something important, what do you actually do?”
• “Why don’t you use [your organization] for that? What gets in the way?”
• “Under what conditions, if any, would you gladly pay – or ask your employer to pay – for help?”

Between the lead users and the noncustomers, you’ll see two things:

• Problems that are starting at the edges but will move toward the center.
• Problems that are so poorly served by your current offerings that people would rather improvise than buy from you.

That’s far more useful than yet another “our overall satisfaction score is 4.3 out of 5” evaluation report.

Turning insight into non-obvious offerings

Once you’ve done even a modest version of the above, you’ll have a short list of jobs and outcomes that are:

• Very important
• Poorly served
• Likely to become more painful as larger shifts (AI, climate, regulation, payment models) play out

The temptation at this point is to go straight back to what you already know: “Great, let’s build a course on that.”

Sometimes that’s fine. More often, you need to stop thinking in terms of individual events and start thinking in terms of solutions.

A few examples to make that more concrete.

1. From credits to coverage

If you hear a lot of anxiety about audits, regulatory reviews, and documentation, the job is not “earn 40 credits.” The job is “never fail an audit and never be surprised.”

Instead of another webinar series, you might create:

• An annual “compliance coverage plan” that includes:
  • Planning and reminders so people aren’t scrambling at the end of a cycle
  • Centralized tracking and documentation
  • Templates, checklists, and a quick-response help desk
  • Audit simulation or review for employers
  • CE built in, but as a means to an end, not the main selling point

You’re selling peace of mind and reduced risk. Credits come along for the ride.

2. From courses to performance

If you hear firms and employers worrying about margins, throughput, and quality, the job is “improve the performance of my team,” not “keep everybody technically up to date.”

Here, you might design:

• Role-specific pathways that tie learning to concrete performance metrics (error rates, turnaround times, advisory revenue, patient outcomes).
• Bundled “competency as a service” offers for employers that include learning, assessments, simple dashboards, and reports they can show regulators, boards, or clients.

Again, CE is part of the package, but the demand is for improved performance that can be shown to someone who cares.

3. From content to credible transition support

If you keep hearing about people wanting to move into leadership, into advisory, or into emerging domains like AI and climate, the job is “make a credible professional transition,” not “get familiar with the basics.”

Possible responses:

• Selective cohorts or micro-fellowships that include:
  • A structured path
  • Real projects
  • Feedback from respected practitioners
  • Some form of signal (credential, endorsement, visible recognition) that actually matters in the market

What people are buying there is identity and status: “I’m one of the people who is leading our AI transition,” not just “I took a course on AI.”

Of course, all of this can still carry CME/CPE. But if you design from the job and the outcome, you stop treating credit hours as the product and start treating them as one feature of something more valuable.

Start small, but stop guessing

None of this requires a massive research budget or a heroic reinvention of your learning business. It does require a different posture.

Concretely, you could do the following over the next 90 days:

1. Run 10–15 serious interviews
   • A mix of highly engaged users, reluctant users, a couple of employers, and a few people who don’t buy from you.
   • Focus on last-time stories, workarounds, and anxieties.
2. Turn what you hear into a short list of outcomes
   • 10–20 statements about what people are actually trying to achieve or avoid.
   • Ask a broader group to rate importance and how well each is handled today.
3. Pick one promising job and build a very small experiment around it
   • A one-page concept sheet.
   • A call with a handful of lead users and employers to pressure-test.
   • A simple landing page or email offer that asks for a real commitment: time, money, or both.

If nobody will commit, you’ve learned something useful and relatively cheap: the demand isn’t there yet, or you haven’t articulated the job in a way that resonates.

If people lean in – especially employers – you’ve just found a pocket of demand that does not depend on winning the race to offer the cheapest credit.

In mature markets, that’s about as close to a competitive advantage as you get.

And if you’re in a world where CME, CPE, or generic professional development has become a commodity, that shift – from credits to real jobs and outcomes – is probably the only way you’re going to move the needle on reach, revenue, and impact over the long term.

The post Beyond Credits: Finding Hidden Demand in a Commoditized Education Market appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

You can’t solve a “marketing problem” in the abstract. You can diagnose—and improve—your awareness and conversion dynamics, product by product, segment by segment. This article lays out how.

What We Mean by Awareness

Awareness is strong when a high percentage of the right people know an offering exists and understand the outcomes it delivers.

• Outcomes
  It’s not enough that people know there’s an offering. They need acute awareness—a clear grasp of how the course, program, or credential advances a specific problem, priority, or goal they have right now.

• Right people
  The right people must include likely learners and the decision-makers and influencers around them—employers, supervisors, credentialing bodies, talent partners, and sometimes the learners’ customers. If these actors don’t know (or can’t easily recall) your offering, you have a practical awareness problem even if your list looks large.

Vague Versus Acute Awareness

Vague awareness manifests as, “I’ve heard of that certificate.” Acute awareness sounds like, “That certificate maps to our Q4 upskilling plan for new supervisors and reduces time to productivity by eight weeks.”

Acute awareness is earned in two places:

1. Offer design
   The product must address a defined, validated need and produce outcomes the audience—and their employers—value.
2. Communication
   Those valued outcomes must be expressed succinctly and repeatedly where the right people already pay attention, following a credible flow from attention to interest to desire to action. (Catch our Leading Learning Podcast episode on the four-part AIDA formula here.)

There’s also a strategic constraint here: How many offerings can you reasonably make any one segment acutely aware of? In a noisy market, the honest answer is not many. That reality pushes you to segment your audience and narrow your catalog and promotional calendar accordingly.

What We Mean by Conversion

Conversion is the set of actions that move someone from awareness to ownership—purchase, enrollment, license, subscription, renewal, or employer adoption. People convert when perceived value meaningfully exceeds the total perceived cost (money, time, effort, and risk).

Five levers matter most:

1. Value equation (including time)
   Price isn’t just dollars; it’s time away from work, cognitive load, administrative hassle, and opportunity cost. Show how the payoff outweighs all of that—and, where you can, reduce those non-monetary costs.
2. Impact and usability
   Will the experience create measurable change in what the learner can do, and will that change be applied? Clear learning objectives, strong practice opportunities, and line-of-sight to workplace application increase conversion and renewal.
3. Signal strength
   What does completion signal to others, especially employers? A recognized badge, alignment to a standard, or integration with internal career steps strengthen conversion long before a prospective learner or organizational purchaser hits “Add to Cart.”
4. Proof
   Specific results, employer testimonials, before-and-after stories, completion and advancement data, and visible alumni outcomes lower perceived risk.
5. Friction (and fit) in the buying path
   Hidden fees, multi-page forms, account creation loops, confusing bundles, unclear dates—all of it depresses conversion. Enterprise buyers also need a different path (procurement, data, terms, etc.) than an individual with a credit card.

Gratification—the personal satisfaction of advancing, belonging, contributing—helps. But in professional learning, it’s rarely decisive without the five items above.

A Practical Awareness-Conversion Diagnostic

Work through the following for each key offering and audience segment, including the employers in your market.

Awareness Checklist

• Segment clarity
  Can you name the one to three highest-value segments for this offering (role, career stage, employer type)?
• Outcome statement
  In one sentence, can you state the specific problem or outcome this offering addresses for the segment?
• Acute awareness assets
  Do you have and use a short “outcomes card” (title, three outcomes in employer terms, time/effort required, evidence of impact) consistently across channels?
• Employer channel
  Have you explicitly equipped managers and HR to understand and advocate for the offering?
• Reach and repetition
  Are you running enough touches in the right places (e.g., owned list, partner lists, member newsletter placements, employer communications, events) to earn recall?
• Catalog focus
  How many offers are you competing with inside your own channels this month for this same segment?

Score each item as either a zero or a one. If you’re below four on an offering, fix your zeros before touching price or revamping the product.

Conversion Checklist

• Value articulation
  Is there a plain-English “why now” and “what changes after” above the fold on the product page?
• Signal
  Is there a recognized signal (credit, badge, alignment to a standard), and is it prominent?
• Proof
  Do you show specific outcomes (metrics, employer quotes, use cases) rather than generic praise?
• Path to purchase
  Can an individual enroll in three or fewer clicks? Is there a clearly labeled employer purchase path (invoice, seat bundles, data terms)?
• Pricing and packaging
  Are options simple (good/better/best or single clear tier) and matched to buyer types?
• Post-purchase clarity
  Is onboarding obvious (dates, access, time commitment, support)?

Again, score each as a zero or a one. A score below four signals conversion issues, and the zeros tell you where to focus.

Common Portfolio Patterns (and What to Do)

You’ll typically find four patterns when you plot your offerings by awareness (low to high) and conversion (low to high).

1. Low awareness and low conversion
   This issue tends to arise with new or neglected products. You either need to sunset or revamp. If these are strategic products, rebuild them, starting with audience need; otherwise, unlist, and stop the drip of internal attention.
2. High awareness but low conversion
   This is the classic “Everyone knows about it, but few buy it” situation. To address this, tighten outcome language and proof; remove jargon; simplify pricing and packaging; fix friction (fewer clicks, clearer dates, enterprise path, etc.); and strengthen the signal (e.g., alignment to a standard or a credible badge).
3. Low awareness but high conversion
   These are your undermarketed gems. Concentrate promotion on one or two segments. Reuse your success proof in your top-of-funnel communications. Add employer channel outreach and partner placements.
4. High awareness and high conversion
   These are your flagship products. You want to protect them and avoid cannibalization. Use them as anchors in your bundles and in employer subscriptions. Build intentional upgrade paths (e.g., from a course to a certificate to renewal).

Narrowing to Win (and Earn Acute Awareness)

If your calendar makes five different asks of the same audience in a month, none of them is likely to achieve acute awareness. Choose the one or two most strategic offerings per core segment per month. Everything else either supports those or waits its turn. Depth beats breadth.

Pragmatically, this means being much more targeted and intentional in what you do.

• Quarterly offer map
  For each core segment, pick no more than two offerings to forefront per quarter and a small set of supporting content or events that point to these forefronted offerings.
• Message discipline
  Maintain one outcome statement and one set of proof (testimonials, outcomes data, etc.) per forefronted offering for the quarter. Repeat. Don’t rewrite every e-mail.
• Partner alignment
  Coordinate placements with chapters, affiliates, and employers around the offerings, using shared outcomes language and proof.

Measuring What Matters

Move beyond global open and click rates to measuring what matters. Track a small, comparable set of metrics for each major offering and segment.

Awareness

For awareness, consider measuring the following:

• Reach to the right-fit segment (percentage of your list that is the target segment for the offering)
• Recall proxy (e.g., direct traffic to product URL, brand-plus-keyword search volume, percentage of segment that reports hearing about the offering at work)
• Partner/employer placements secured (e.g., in employer internal newsletters, chapter social media posts)

In general, you want to know that the people you need to reach are on your e-mail list. If not, make a concerted effort to get them there. You want evidence that people are aware enough of the offering to type it directly into search (rather than clicking a link presented to them), that they recall hearing about it (particularly in highly relevant places, like where they work),  and that others are helping to spread the word.

Conversion

To monitor conversion, you might look at metrics like these:

• The number of product page views compared to the number of checkouts started compared to the number of checks completed (for for sales to individuals)
• The number of employer inquiries compared to the number of purchase orders or contracts (for enterprise sales)
• Abandonment points (e.g., top reasons based on an exit survey or chat logs)
• Time to first meaningful activity (e.g., completion of the first module)

In general, you want a clear view into what happens after people become aware of the offering. Do they purchase? How smooth is the purchase process? What specific barriers do they encounter? Do they then move on to using the offering?

Signal and Impact

To help you with signal and showing the impact of the product, look to metrics like these:

• Completion rate and time to completion
• Comparisons of performance on learner pre- and post-assessments (where relevant)
• Manager-reported behavior change or improvements in performance metrics tracked by employers
• Learner self-reporting of job and/or career impact
• Renewal/upsell rate (e.g., course to certificate or certificate to renewal)

Pick a baseline, then aim for one meaningful improvement per quarter rather than chasing everything at once.

A 30-Day Action Plan

To help you make meaningful progress on an awareness-conversion problem in the short term, you need a plan.

Week 1: Selection and Framing

• Choose two offerings and two segments to focus on.
• Draft or refine the one-sentence outcomes statement for each (learner and employer versions).
• Using language that can be shared with prospective learners and their employers, create a one-page (or shorter) brief for each offering that includes the following information:
  • Outcomes
    Use one to three bullet points to state the expected benefits and results.
  • Time and effort required
    How much time and effort will be required to complete the offering? For example, “This course runs for four weeks total and requires approximately two hours per week. Live sessions are Tuesdays, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern, and learners are expected to spend approximately one hour on homework per week.”
  • Recognition
    What will the learner get that they value and others recognize? This might be credit, a badge, alignment to a standard, or steps in an internal career path.
  • Proof of impact
    Provide evidence that the offering produces results. This might be data on the percent of learners who report career advancement or positive job impact or employer endorsements.

Week 2: Awareness Upgrades

• Use the language from the outcomes brief consistently across Web site, e-mail, partner placements, and employer one-pagers.
• Cut any competing messages in your promotions calendar for those segments this month.
• Secure two employer or partner placements per offering.

Week 3: Conversion Clean-Up

• Rewrite product pages to put outcomes, recognition, and proof of impact above the fold.
• Reduce to three or fewer clicks to enroll
• Add or clarify the employer purchase path.
• Simplify packaging (one default option and a clear enterprise bundle).

Week 4: Proof and Follow-Through

• Collect or surface one employer quote and one outcome metric for each offering.
• Add brief post-purchase orientation e-mails specific to the type of purchaser (individual learner or employer), focused on what to do in the first 15 minutes.
• Set up a simple abandonment survey for anyone who begins but does not complete the purchase process. Within two weeks, identify and address the most common, high-impact barriers that you can realistically fix quickly (e.g., unclear dates or missing price information).

Pitfalls to Avoid

As you work on an awareness-conversion problem, beware of common missteps.

• Trying to solve awareness with more volume
  If the message isn’t specific and the catalog is too broad, more e-mails and posts won’t fix it.
• Treating employers as an afterthought
  Employer awareness and an enterprise path often move the needle faster than more consumer traffic.
• Pricing in isolation
  If the value story, signal, or proof is weak, discounting just burns margin.
• Redesigning before diagnosing
  Fix the bottleneck you actually have. Don’t rewrite everything because a metric looks bad somewhere else.

What All This Means

“Marketing” only becomes tractable when you diagnose the awareness-conversion mechanics of specific offerings for specific segments, especially employers. Most learning businesses can materially improve results within a quarter by narrowing their catalog focus, moving from vague to acute awareness, and removing obvious conversion friction. Do that consistently, and you’ll reclaim capacity for the deeper work—offer design, credential signaling, and employer partnerships—that makes growth durable.

The post Awareness and Conversion: Diagnose the Real Marketing Problem in Your Learning Business appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

We have consulted with organizations over many years, and we have seen the pressure to grow education revenue increase significantly. Boards expect it. Staff want it. Vendors promise it. And yet most education portfolios continue to underperform. Market dynamics and poor execution are only partly to blame.

In this article, we’ll look at seven key issues that hinder education revenue performance in associations. This underperformance stems from deep structural and strategic issues which, in turn, lead to failures in the market and, ultimately, an erosion of value.

Structural Issues

Association education is impacted by three key structural blind spots. Together, these weaken education’s footing before it ever faces the market.

Lack of Organizational Focus

The education function in associations suffers from the same “Be all things to all members” mentality that afflicts associations generally. Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers highlighted this issue more than a decade ago in Race for Relevance, noting that “‘The bigger, the better’ and ‘The more, the merrier’ seem to describe the common bias” among association leadership and management.

This bias cascades down to education, where we hear repeatedly that organizations want to be the “one-stop shop” or, better yet, the “Amazon.com” of their markets, seemingly ignoring the vast amount of resources and decades of losses it took for Amazon to achieve its unique positioning in the retail world (or the fact that there is little indication anyone is looking for an “Amazon of education”).

Most associations in our experience try to serve too many audiences with too many products, resulting in a smorgasbord of courses, conference sessions, and other offerings that are difficult to manage and maintain effectively and for which quality levels often vary dramatically from product to product. As I have argued before, associations have a responsibility to support learning across their member bases, but that is very different from providing a comprehensive set of formal education products for every segment of membership.

The Nonprofit Versus For-Profit Tension

The second issue often goes hand in hand with the first. Most associations are mission-driven nonprofits, which contributes to the compulsion to provide education for everyone. But most education departments, based on our experience and research, are expected to break even, and many are expected to generate a surplus to contribute towards fulfilling the broader mission.

Basically, associations want it both ways, but the education-for-everyone mentality tends to maintain an upper hand. Governance structures and leadership pipelines are rarely designed for true entrepreneurial risk-taking or driving profitability. Without clarity, education gets caught in the middle—not subsidized enough to serve mission in a clear, compelling way but also not invested in sufficiently to stand on its own commercially in the face of growing competition and heightened customer expectations.

It’s rare, in our experience, for associations to have modeled out, on a product line by product line bases, what the true profit-and-loss numbers are on their educational offerings. Even rarer is visibility into metrics like expected cashflow from specific products. Arguably, this is visibility an organization should have even if education is treated purely as a member benefit that supports mission. If the aim is profitability, this kind of visibility isn’t optional—and commercial competitors most definitely do not ignore it.

Non-Dues Revenue Marginalization

Associations talk a lot about non-dues revenue, but, in our experience, education is rarely at the center of that discussion. Sponsorship and advertising dominate. You can see this, for example, in the agendas and typical attendees for major non-dues revenue events or in social media postings on the topic.

Some of this marginalization is no doubt owing to the background of the people who tend to drive non-dues revenue discussions and organize related events. They tend to come from the events and tech sides of associations. Arguably, another key cause for this marginalization is the muddled state of education focus suggested earlier (mission? profit?) and the shortage of educational leaders with a business orientation and corresponding capabilities.

The disconnect, of course, is that education is quite clearly central to non-dues revenue. ASAE, citing its own Operating Ratio Report, says that educational programming fees are one of the sources on which associations rely most heavily for non-dues revenue. And that accounts only for education as a direct source of revenue. Education is very often a driver for sponsorship, whether for discrete offerings like Webinars or as a critical part of the overall value proposition for events.

Associations talk a lot about non-dues revenue, but, in our experience, education is rarely at the center of that discussion.

Market Failures

Compounding the structural issues are key weaknesses that tend to characterize association education in the broader market for adult learning. When the market compares association education to other providers, these weaknesses become glaring.

Declining Perception of Competitiveness

Learners often compare association offerings—whether consciously or not—to LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Duolingo, and similar “Big Learning” providers, even if associations tell themselves they’re in a different category. For some of the reasons already cited, associations cannot match those platforms on scale or polish. Even an organization that is fully focused, has resolved the nonprofit/for-profit tension, and takes education seriously as a source of non-dues revenue is unlikely to ever have the resources needed to compete as a large catalog player.

This doesn’t mean associations can’t be competitive, only that they are unlikely to be seen that way if they allow the yardstick against which they are measured to be Big Learning providers. As already suggested, most associations would benefit by greatly narrowing their catalogs and focusing on a few high-priority segments of their audience. Additionally, they need to tightly align their educational offerings to the authority assets that differentiate them from commercial providers—things like standards, credentials, research, and advocacy.

Worn-Out Business Models

The “one course, one learner” model is exhausted, but too many associations still rely on it as their main, if not their only, way of selling their educational offerings.

Subscriptions, bundles, and cohort-based approaches are proven ways to generate higher sales volumes and more predictable revenue. To the extent they serve to keep learners more engaged over time, these approaches can also contribute significantly to learning effectiveness—i.e., making learning stick. Still, associations have been slow to adopt such approaches and/or to leverage them to their full potential. Our survey of the 2025 learning business landscape found that only 31 percent of respondents had introduced a subscription for all or part of their catalog, and less than half of respondents were leveraging bundling as a revenue model.

Associations, particularly those with individual members, have also been relatively slow to embrace business-to-business, or B2B, selling. The obvious advantage of selling to companies, organization, and other institutional purchasers is that you can sell many offerings to many learners in one fell swoop, substantially increasing revenue. Combine this type of selling with models like subscriptions and bundling, and you can amplify the revenue impact while simultaneously building valuable long-term relationships with both learners and employers.

Waning Product Formats

Webinars remain the workhorse of association online education, and most conferences still look much as they did decades ago. Neither Webinars nor conferences are likely to disappear overnight, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be significantly revamped and that associations can’t simultaneously be moving toward other models.

The issue is not technology adoption—it’s the lack of design discipline. Low-tech improvements in how content and experiences are structured could dramatically improve learning outcomes and perceived value but are ignored too often. Simple changes to learning experiences like factoring in time for reflection, incorporating opportunities for self-testing, and providing simple resources to help learners more easily apply what they have learned back at the office can make a huge difference. And approaches like coaching and cohort-based learning can provide a high degree of personalization and interactivity without requiring a heavy investment in technology.

All these suggestions require subject matter experts who are prepared to deliver on them. As we have argued many times before, investing in training subject matter experts and presenters to be better educators is one of the highest-leverage actions learning businesses can take.

Erosion of Value Perception

The cumulative, highly damaging consequence of the preceding factors is that association education sends weak signals of value to both learners and employers.

Weak Signaling

There’s a well-established—indeed, Nobel-prize-winning—body of economic theory that the value of education often lies less in direct skill transfer and more in the signals it sends, particularly to employers. While this theory is mainly associated with secondary and higher education, it can be applied to associations.

Very often, the education that associations offer is seen as a grudging necessity (e.g., for compliance) or a nice-to-have perk (e.g., much professional development). If it is associated with a credential of some sort, it is possible—though far from a given—that the credential is seen as having economic value, but association educational offerings rarely signal strong value in their own right. The fact that associations often do not market their offerings effectively and frequently underprice or give away education only serves to reinforce this situation.

Very often, the education that associations offer is seen as a grudging necessity (e.g., for compliance) or a nice-to-have perk (e.g., much professional development).

Economist Bryan Kaplan has suggested three key elements of signaling: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. Associations tend to come up weak in all three:

• Few measure learning outcomes, resulting in a weak intelligence signal.
• Few impose rigor (e.g., tests, projects, renewals), creating a weak conscientiousness signal.
• Few build coherent pathways or standardize content, leading to a weak conformity signal.

The result is the education is perceived as hours of credit rather than serious professional formation.

The Way Forward

The problems outlined here are not new. What is new is the urgency. Learners have more choices than ever, and commercial competitors are raising expectations for value, convenience, and quality. If associations continue to underinvest or to straddle the line between mission and margin, they will see their education portfolios decline in both relevance and revenue.

The path forward requires clarity and discipline in multiple areas.

1. Make an explicit strategic choice.
Decide whether education will function primarily as a subsidized mission multiplier or a commercial business line. You can make that choice for the portfolio as a whole or vary it by product or product line—positioning some offerings as mission multipliers and others as profit-driven. What matters is clarity. Either model is viable, but drifting between them is not. A clear stance enables offerings, investments, and measures of success to align with the chosen model.

2. Align education with authority assets.
Associations cannot win by trying to be Coursera or LinkedIn Learning. They can win by tying education directly to what differentiates them: standards, credentials, research, and advocacy. Education that extends and amplifies these authority assets is harder to displace and easier to monetize.

3. Modernize the business model.
Move beyond “one course, one learner.” Subscriptions, bundles, B2B licensing, and cohort-based learning are proven models that increase both engagement and revenue predictability. Microlearning and coaching, when integrated into broader pathways, can provide ongoing touchpoints that build loyalty and impact.

4. Strengthen the signal.
Education that sends weak signals of rigor, relevance, and achievement will always be undervalued. Associations must invest in assessments, pathways, and marketing that communicate intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. Strong signals not only attract learners but also employers and sponsors who want to be associated with high quality.

5. Invest in capacity.
Revenue growth is not just about models and products; it’s about people and process. Training subject matter experts to teach well, building pricing and marketing capability, and developing partnerships with employers are all necessary steps. Associations that treat education as a core business will invest accordingly.

Taken together, these moves require clarity and courage, not just more effort. They challenge long-held habits—of trying to serve everyone, of underpricing to avoid criticism, of treating education as ancillary. But associations that are willing to make these shifts will find themselves not only with stronger education revenue but with a renewed role as essential leaders in the professional development of their fields.

The post What’s Broken with Association Education Revenue? appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

The terms learning culture (or, alternatively, culture of learning) and learning ecosystem have been relatively trendy in the corporate learning and development world for many years, but our experience has been that they are used much less frequently in the world of learning businesses. We’re seeing some signs that may be changing, and it’s a change that’s needed.

Why?

We’ve made the point before that learning is not an event; it’s a process. But that process is neither linear nor isolated. Even our most clearly defined learning experiences happen in interaction with other people and our environment and are influenced by countless other processes that may be unfolding on our lives.

And, of course, most of our learning experiences are not clearly defined. They emerge organically from the sum of our day-to-day experiences.

Most of the focus of learning businesses historically has been on what might be described as “point in time” solutions – classes, courses, conference sessions that are mere blips on the overall context of a learner’s life and career. Blips that appear and fade away quite rapidly, often leaving little, if any, trace behind.

If we’re going really support lifelong learning, if we are going to position ourselves in the career business, rather than the education or events business, if we are, in fact, going to lead learning in the fields and industries we serve, then we must understand and address each learner’s need in context, over time. And we must understand that we have some ability to not just to react to context, but also to influence and shape it.

As our series on the frontiers of learntech made clear, technology has opened new possibilities for serving learners in this way. The sheer increase in our ability to reach and connect with learners has changed the learning landscape permanently, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and possibilities for personalization will also leave an indelible mark.

But simply implementing better technology isn’t going to carry us into the future of learning. The key is in our relationships with and to our learners – and learning culture and learning ecosystem are at the heart of those relationships.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

What is a Learning Culture?

Culture, broadly speaking, may be defined as a cohesive, integrated, and persistent pattern of knowledge, belief, and behavior exhibited by a group of human beings.

Learning may be defined as “the lifelong process of transforming information and experience into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes.”

Learning is the the lifelong process of transforming information and experience into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes

Mission to Learn

Combining the two definitions, a learning culture is one in which the process of learning drives the pattern of culture. Learning is among the highest values of the group of people involved, and learning, because it inherently leads to change, enables and drives the evolution of the culture.

Put somewhat differently, a learning culture is a culture that clearly values and prioritizes learning, rewards the pursuit of learning, and is therefore able to change, adapt, and evolve as circumstances require.

For learning business, this culture is not confined to a single organization, but rather extends out to the broader community, field, or industry the business services. (That said, as prerequisite to supporting the broader culture, the business should have a strong internal learning culture. Modeling the desired outcomes is crucial, and it is difficult to model what you have not fully appreciated and integrated into your own practices.)

Dynamics of Learning Culture

It is important to recognize that while education and training can be important elements of a learning culture, there is nothing about “learning culture” per se that requires formal education and training experiences. Living itself is learning. Participants in a learning culture recognize this equivalence, whether consciously or not, and this recognition shapes their mindset with respect to both life and learning.

Too much of a focus on training and education can actually impede a learning culture if training and education experiences – and, typically, the credit associated with them – evolve to act as a proxy for true learning. Simply putting in the time or “checking the box” for a formal, structured educational activity may be perceived as learning when, in reality, little is gained from the experience, whether because it is not truly relevant to the learner, the learner is not motivated, or myriad other reasons.

Finally, a true learning culture is never fixed or static; it is emergent, representing the continuing accumulation of interactions within the culture – i.e., the patterns. Because this is the case, learning culture cannot be prescribed, it can only be influenced and fostered. Equally important, learning culture, by its very nature, requires social interaction and community. Those seeking to influence and foster a learning community must be meaningful participants in these interactions and community wherever they arise. 

What is a Learning Ecosystem?

An ecosystem in nature is a community of living beings interacting with each other and their environment. When healthy, it is characterized by balance and an innate understanding that no single part of the system is more important than another and that changes in one part of the ecosystem may impact multiple other parts of the ecosystem directly or indirectly.

Ecosystem is an apt metaphor to apply to learning given that learning is also fundamentally about interactions among human beings and between human beings and their environment or context. We have the ability to shape and influence a learning ecosystem through decisions about the people involved, the substance of the learning experiences offered, and the tools and technologies used to support and connect the two. From this perspective, a learning ecosystem is comprised of people, content, technology, and the processes and strategies that unite them.

The whole of a learning ecosystem, however, is greater than the sum of its parts. Learning culture emerges from a learning ecosystem while simultaneously influencing and impacting the ecosystem. Just as culture is dynamic and evolving, the ecosystem, too, is dynamic and evolving. The two concepts are inseparable from each other: two side of the same coin or, borrowing from the poet William Butler Yeats, as hard to distinguish as the dancer and the dance. 

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

William Butler Years, Among School Children

That said, while firm control of culture and ecosystem is impossible, decisions made about an ecosystem – the components, the processes, the strategy – do impact its health and, by extension, the health and efficacy of the learning culture. As in nature, too much of an emphasis on any one factor – a delivery method or approach to learning, for example – may negatively impact the whole. Learning ecosystem decisions should always be made with the desired outcomes – including the desired learning culture – in mind.

Start With a Shift In Mindset

Of course, very few learning businesses start from a blank slate with respect to either ecosystem or culture. There are already elements of each in place, both within the business and within the broader community, field, or industry it serves. The challenge and the opportunity are to make the effort to assess current culture and ecosystem, to establish a vision for the future state of culture and ecosystem, and consciously set about the work of influencing each in a positive direction, one that will elevate the range, relevance, and quality of learning experiences available to each individual learner.

For most learning businesses, this will require a significant shift in mindset across the stakeholder base – often meaning not only staff, board members, and volunteers (where relevant), but also learners themselves. In the world of adult lifelong learning, we tend to be very validation-centric, viewing primarily those experiences associated with continuing education, certification, and other forms of “credit” as valid learning experiences. This bias is usually unconscious, but it confuses education and learning to the detriment of learning.

As an initial step toward prioritizing learning ecosystem and learning culture, the bias needs to be made conscious – again, across the stakeholder base – and organizations need to make a much more conscious effort to support less formal opportunities as well as opportunities that are not “one size fits all” as so many continuing education and professional development opportunities essentially are currently.

None of this is to say that there is not a place for traditional formal approaches. Rather, it is a call for a significant shift in emphasis and a recognition that, while formal education certainly can and should play a key role in supporting a learning culture, excessive focus on it can make it difficult to realize the potential of other, less formal elements as well as to personalize experiences to the needs of individual learners.

For most organizations, gathering the right group of people – usually a combination of staff, key volunteers (if relevant), and some representative learners – and asking the question, “How else – beyond what we have traditionally done – could we foster and support learning for the people we serve?” is a simple, but powerful first step toward shifting mindset and identifying the opportunities that a focus on learning ecosystem and learning culture represent.

How else – beyond what we have traditionally done – could we foster and support learning for the people we serve?

If you are interested in successfully navigating and leading the future of learning in your community, field, or industry, it’s a gathering I highly encourage you to start scheduling today.

The post Pursuing Learning Culture and Learning Ecosystem appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

If we want to expand our knowledge on any topic, simply pulling out our smart phones and doing a quick Google search will lead us to a wealth of resources. With enough time and motivation, there are very few limits to what we may be able to learn

It’s a huge opportunity. But I probably don’t have to tell you that it is also a huge challenge.

The same resources that can help us can also quickly overwhelm us and leave us with more questions than answers.

How do we decide which resources are most worth our time?

How reliable are the sources of any information we find?

How do we manage to remember any important information we find?

We need an approach to managing it, making sense, learning. That approach can be described as curation.

What is Curation?

The concept of curation is most often identified with museums. A skilled museum curator chooses among a wide range of objects – anything from paintings, to dinosaur bones, to ancient relics, depending on the type of museum.

Then, by the way in which she organizes and displays them, she creates a context and story that connects them together, giving them much more meaning than they would have on their own.

An effective curator of learning does much the same thing

Curating for learning involves making choices about content and experiences from among a large number of options; infusing those choices with context and meaning; and sharing the results with others.

Very common examples are the people you find in just about any field or industry who seem to read an enormous amount, filter it all down into a handful of useful Web links, write brief commentaries on the links, and then send it out periodically in the form of a newsletter. There’s a good chance you already subscribe to one or two newsletters that you rely on to help you make sense of what is going on in your world.

And that, fundamentally, is what curation is all about: helping people – including yourself – make sense.

Leveraging Curation for Learning

So how can you leverage curation as part of your ongoing pursuit of lifelong learning?

First, you can find and follow good curators.

If you want to combat information overload and get to what really matters, I see this as one of the surest ways. Find people who are already doing a great job making sense of the areas you care about.

There’s a good chance you are already aware of some of these people. For example, they may be:

• People who consistently contribute the most interesting content to any blogs, newsletters, magazines, or other content sources you access regularly
• Authors who have published books on topics you care about
• Speakers who have impressed you at any conferences you’ve attended

Not all of these people will qualify as curators, but with a little searching among this group, you will find some who clearly possess the qualities of a good curator  and make an ongoing effort to find and share useful information. They may do this through a blog, a newsletter, social medial, or some combination of these channels.

And, of course, to find other sources, you can search on Google and social media channels like Twitter or LinkedIn on topics you care about the most. Based on your results, you may find specific people you want to follow, or you may choose to follow keywords from your Google search (e.g., “lifelong learning”) or hashtags on social networks (e.g., #lifelonglearning)

But how do you do all of this following?

With newsletters, of course, all you have to do is subscribe, but I also recommend setting up one or more folders in your e-mail program where you file away the e-newsletters you receive. This makes it easy find them later and review multiple newsletters at one time.

Following blogs and social media channels is a bit more complex, but one tool that makes it tremendously easier is an RSS reader like Feedly or Inoreader. There are free versions of both of these tools and you can use them to pull content from blogs and keywords searches into a single dashboard where you can organize them and make then easy to review and refer back to over time.

You can even use a tool like FetchRSS (free version available) to make an RSS feed out of Twitter feeds, public Facebook Pages, and just about any Web page. These, too, can be managed in a reader like Feedly or Inoreader. (You can even subscribe to newsletter via RSS using the free Notifier service.)

When you first start out, you may find that you end up subscribing to or following a lot of sources. That’s okay – you can and should pare down and refine over time, until you get to the set of curated content that is most consistently valuable to you. (Unsubscribe and Unfollow are options that need to be continually exercised!)

One final word of advice: don’t just pick curators who seem to always be towing the same old line and writing about things you already know and believe in. Find some who clearly have perspectives and opinions that are different from yours.

One of the dangers of the social Web is that we tend to gravitate, often unconsciously, toward people who seem like us in some way. As a result, we can end up in an “echo chamber” where we hear the same sorts of things again and again. It is very hard to learn, though, if you aren’t really being exposed to anything new!

Becoming a Curator

Once you have started following curators, you are actually well along the path to becoming a curator yourself. After all, you are already actively finding and reviewing information on topics you care about.

With just a bit more thought and effort, you can leverage your efforts into becoming a source of knowledge and learning others will want to follow. Along the way, you will enhance and deepen your own learning significantly as you think about how to curate effectively for others.

How do you do all of this this? First and foremost, you need a strategy and a process.

Curation Strategy

Creating a strategy may sound daunting, but an effective curation strategy really comes down to just four key elements.

• Who? – Who will you be curating for? Most likely your target audience will be people who share something in common with you – like, for example, working in the same field or industry. I recommend trying to picture a few examples of potential followers in your mind and maybe even writing down what you feel are some of their most relevant characteristics.
• Why? – What is it you want to help your “Who” do? How will what you curate be used? Having your audience’s motivations and the outcomes they want to achieve in mind makes it much easier to identify the content that it will be most valuable to share.
• What? Given what you know about “Who” and “Why” what types of content and experiences seem most valuable? You may not know exactly at first, but develop some working theories and start trying them out to see what kind of response you get (e.g., clicks on articles you share, people e-mailing you with comments or questions).
• How? What medium and frequency make sense for sharing the knowledge you curate? I’ve mentioned newsletters, but those certainly aren’t the only option. A blog, a Twitter feed, YouTube, or some other channel may make more sense for your Who, Why, and What. And, should you send out resources daily, weekly, monthly? Again, you may not know for certain at first, but develop a theory based on what you do know and give it a try.

With a strategy in place, you are ready to engage in the curation process.

The Curation Process

There are many ways to go about curating knowledge and learning experiences, but all of them, when done effectively, involve the following six elements:

• Discover – To have content to share, you first have to find content that is a good fit for your Who, What, and Why. We discussed this part of the process in the previous section.
• Organize – As you find content, you need to create order from the chaos. As already suggested, a simple approach is to throw everything into one or more e-mail folders so that you can sort through them later. If, on the other hand, you use a tool like like Feedly or Inoreader, you can easily use categories and tags to group similar items together and make them much easier to find later. You can even add notes to items to make sure you will remember just why you saved them.
• Contextualize – This is where the real value of curation starts to be realized. Using whichever medium you have chosen for sharing your findings – text, audio, video, or some combination – you add explanations, draw comparisons, connect the dots between the items you have discovered and the world of your followers. In the process, you add a dose of your own perspective and personality.
• Share – Once everything is organized and contextualized, the time has come to share all the value you have created with your audience. Some curators do this through a single channel, like an e-mail newsletter, but you may want to take advantage of multiple channels. In addition to sending out the curated Mission to Learn newsletter, for example, I also share curated items on Facebook and Twitter. Some of these may also be in the newsletter; some are “bonus” content.
• Monitor – One of the best ways to improve your curation efforts over time is to pay attention to what prompts a response from your audience. Which of the items you share get clicked on? Commented on? Shared or liked on social media by your followers? These are metrics that the platforms you choose to share content on will most likely have easy ways of tracking – and they help you know whether you are hitting the mark or not.
• Refine – Finally, based on what you learn from the other parts of the process, what changes will you make going forward? As part of the process, you may find new content sources. You may find that one channel (e.g., Facebook) seems to work much better than another for sharing content (e.g., e-mail newsletter). You may find that you are hitting the mark better in some areas of your content than others. Over time, as you receive this feedback and make changes, your curation efforts will become more and more valuable.

If it is not obvious already, the process outlined above is very much a learning process. As you seek to help others you will inevitably find that you learn a tremendous amount yourself, not just about your chosen topic areas, but also about how to effectively facilitate and contribute to knowledge sharing.

Does that make sense?

As I suggested earlier, curation is fundamentally about making sense – both for yourself and, should you decide to become a public curator, for others. Like learning itself, curation is a process.

Very few things in our complex world make sense based on single blog post, Tweet, or newsletter entry. The real key to curation, as with nearly all effective lifelong learning practices, is to stick with it over time, both as a follower of other curators and as a curator yourself.

If you do, my experience is that learning acquires a richness and a depth that is difficult to achieve with more traditional approaches. The best news is that the tools to embrace curation as an approach to learning are readily available to all of us. It makes a great of sense to add curation to your lifelong learning mix today.

JTC

A version of this post by Jeff Cobb was originally published on the 9 Billion Schools website.

The post How to Curate Lifelong Learning appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

I first posed this question in a post published in 2014. At the time, I framed it as “not such a crazy question” given the growing criticism of higher education as well as the emergence of myriad options for self-directed learning and the rise of alternative forms of credentialing.

Roll forward six years, and the questions seems even less if crazy – if crazy at all.

For the most part, higher education – and, in particular, undergraduate education – has failed to repair or reform (much less transform) itself. Tuition costs remain high – too high for many adult learners – while the results they underwrite are arguably not what they should be. While it is still true that college graduates on average fare better economically than non-graduates, there are nuances buried in the averages that often get overlooked.

First, most of the economic gain comes from actually graduating – it is the degree, not the education that creates the most value in employment markets. College often amounts to a very resource intensive version of what is called “job market signaling” in economic circles. If you shell out the money for multiple years of college but don’t actually finish, you will likely be sorely disappointed by the economic returns.

Second, there is a credible case – as put forward by Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education – that only certain types of students realize the economic benefits of college. For many, it is a bad choice from the get-go, but as Blakes Boles (drawing on Peter Thiel) argues in Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School, we have made higher education into a sort of secular religion against which is very difficult to transgress. (Donald Clark also offers a compelling comparison between the medieval Catholic church pre-Luther and our current higher education system.)

Even if we lay these (and other) economic considerations aside, everything we know about how learning happens best – spaced over time, with continued effort and progressive practice, ideally in a context as similar as possible to the one where the learning will actually be applied  – and everything we are seeing in the current world of work (not to mention the world more generally) suggests that the de-contextualized “massed learning” represented by the traditional undergraduate degree is not the best approach to preparing most of us for work and life. As the authors of a 2019 Harvard Business Review article put it:

In an age of ubiquitous disruption and unpredictable job evolution, it is hard to argue that the knowledge acquisition historically associated with a university degree is still relevant.

There is, of course, the argument that college in its traditional, on-campus form is not really about “knowledge acquisition” – it is about the experience. It is about providing a place where young people can transition into adult life, with the opportunity to try new things and build new relationships in a relatively low risk environment. Like job market signaling, this is a very expensive, resource-intensive approach to a problem – if it actually is one – that could be solved in other ways – like, say, through experiences readily available in life itself. And it’s an approach historically available only to the privileged or those willing to assume the risk of significant debt. It seems particularly out of tune with our current cultural moment.

All of the above are issues that have existed for years, but they are now compounded by the looming financial crisis sparked by COVID-19. By some reports, U.S. colleges and universities were already experiencing an enrollment decline over the past decade. Now they stand to lose billions of dollars not only from a sharp decline in enrollments – both domestically and internationally – but also from the market declines, decreases in donor funding, and government budget cuts that are likely to accompany an economic downturn.

These declines will be accompanied by a need to invest significantly in online capacity for institution that want to survive. Many won’t survive the shift, though, and it may be only the biggest brands – Harvard, Stanford, Oxford – that truly manage to thrive in the new frontier of higher education. It’s difficult not to believe that some version of the bleak future NYU professor Scott Galloway paints – in which big tech and big university brands unite – will come to pass.

The Role Associations Can Play

Most likely some form of college will persist for many years to come, but whatever form it takes, it seems more than reasonable to ask at this point whether it couldn’t be replaced with something more in line with our current world.

Which brings us back to the title question: Could associations replace college?

There are good reasons to think they could in many instances.

Associations already have a long history of providing career-related education to the people in the industries and professions they serve, making it possible for individuals to continually update and add to their knowledge and skills. As Heather McGowan has illustrated so concisely, this is precisely what is needed to navigate work in our current world.

We need the ability to move in and out of formal educational experiences while also having access to resources that support our learning in the flow of work. “Higher” education makes much more sense not as a single, large chunk of time, but as many smaller chunks and connections spaced out over time.

While the educational experiences offered by associations are usually characterized as “continuing education” – positioning them in relation to higher education – many associations already do offer learning experiences that are foundational to employment. It is not difficult to imagine significant expansion of programs – bootcamps, institutes, and the like – that help onboard people into careers, establishing an initial base from which additional learning will flow and evolve.

Associations also have a long history of providing various forms of credentialing, from certificates to high stakes certifications, that are themselves a form of the “job market signaling” in which so much of the value of higher education degrees resides. In my experience, many have not fully appreciated the signaling aspect of their credentials – meaning they have not put sufficient effort into establishing their value with employers – but again, it is not difficult to envision that changing. (And, of course, for many associations, this is already a booming area of business.)

Associations are also in the unique position of representing members throughout whatever period of time they remain in the field or industry they serve – which in many instances means throughout their entire career – even as they change jobs and employers.

What’s more, by nature of their day-to-day activities and their relationships with members and employers, associations are uniquely positioned to understand the knowledge and capabilities most needed now and in the future within their particular field or industry. It’s become very trendy in learning and development circles to talk about a “culture of learning” and “learning ecosystems.” Because they transcend specific employers, associations are arguably in the best position to be the primary facilitators of the learning culture and ecosystems within a given profession. They are in a better position than just about any other entity to lead learning.

Finally, associations are, by their very nature, networks and – in the best cases – learning communities, ones that blend education, career, and personal identity to a degree unmatched by any other institution. Arguably, one of the most valuable intangible aspects of the traditional college experience has been the relationships students develop during their years of study. These relationships, along with the shared sense of identity that makes it possible for them to reach out even to other graduates who they do not know personally, can be of significant help in navigating the years of life and career that follow college. While associations may never offer the level of bonding possible in a four-to-five-year on-campus experience, it is again not difficult to see how specialized programming can help foster significant long-term relationships among members.

And, of course, associations already offer a shared sense of identity to members along with myriad opportunities for connecting and re-connecting throughout a career – precisely the type of support structure that is valuable for learning in the flow of work and learning in the flow of career. The strongest and most useful learning emerges out of connection, community, and a shared sense of identity over time.

Each of the points above is compelling separately. Combined, they offer a portrait of an institution that is primed to support the future of work and the future of learning.

What Does the Shift Require?

The reality is that, for the most part, associations already play the role I describe above. They are a key component of what I have characterized elsewhere as the “third sector of education,” the massive, but generally overlooked and underappreciated network of support for adult lifelong learners that has become increasingly critical in our increasingly complex, chaotic, and fast-changing world.

As I’ve also pointed out, association leaders have also been conspicuously absent in most of the public debate around addressing the need for lifelong learning. If associations are to be seen as a viable alternative to college, that will need to change, but other key changes will also be needed.

Re-framing Membership

While there have been a handful influential books and articles in the past several years that have questioned the relevance of associations and the future of membership, these have been primarily good for driving business for consultants and less helpful for accurately assessing the state of associations. For the majority of associations, membership has either increased or held steady in recent years. Associations aside, membership as a business model is booming, as Robbie Kellman Baxter has convincingly illustrated. With the right leadership and positioning, there are clear upsides to embracing what Baxter characterizes as “the forever transaction.”

Traditional association membership has been primarily about identification with a group – a sense of professional “belonging” – and – for purposes of bargaining and advocacy – strength in numbers. These are basic human needs and, as such, will remain reasons for joining an association, but there is an opportunity in our current environment to forefront the value of membership as a conduit for learning, as a source of guidance and clarity in maintaining and developing the knowledge needed throughout a career.

In my experience, there are a growing number of learning leaders at associations thinking in this way, but few have implemented a vision that is visible to their members and prospective members. The average association value proposition still tends to be “pay us money so that you can belong and get discounts.” From this perspective, members are really more like customers – and there has been a long-term shift toward associations treating them this way.

This difference – customer vs. member –  is subtle, but critical to recognize because of the expectations implicit in each. A customer is primarily seeking value for herself in exchange for money. While a member also seeks personal value, she also buys into – literally and figuratively – a set of values and a vision (at least if the association is doing its job). When the customer mentality seeps into association operations, it changes the nature of member relationships. It becomes easy to be focused more on the needs of individual members (really, customers) than the greater purpose for which membership was originally (at least in theory) seen as a conduit. Transactions trump relationships, leading to a lot of “checkbook” members.  It’s not an academic point: Organizations that really aim to lead learning in the industries and professions they serve need members – not just customers – who are bought into that vision. This goes well beyond the Netflix or Amazon Prime conception of membership, and it is critical, in my opinion, to real leadership in the third sector.

Embracing Learning as a Process­

Core to the idea that associations have a special role to play in lifelong learning is the understanding that learning takes place over time. Often a long time. Even a four-to-five-year span of time, particularly one that is often a collection of disjointed experiences, is nowhere near sufficient.

But associations themselves are currently too focused on learning as an event rather than a process.

Indeed, the annual event – currently being thrown into turmoil for most organizations by COVID-19 – is often the main, if not only, focused effort for providing educational support to members. Members convene, sit through multiple general and breakout sessions over multiple days, and then forget the vast majority of what they have heard within days of leaving the event. The same is true of the catalog of seminars and online courses that many organizations offer. These are one-off educational events, based more on a single transaction than an ongoing relationship with the learner.

That will need to change for the true value of associations as lifelong learning facilitators to be realized. To return to the idea of culture and ecosystems, associations need to view each event as just one touch point in the learner’s journey and focus both on helping the individual learner map that journey and on developing the culture and ecosystem in which the learning is supported.

Forging Productive Partnerships

While I have been critical of higher education in this article, the shift I’m describing cannot be achieved by associations alone. Academia is an important partner. There are still plenty of instances, of course, where the concentrated acquisition of technical skills is needed before entry into a profession, and a two- or four-year college may remain the most effective option for this type of training and education in many instances. (Though, to be honest, it is not difficult to imagine larger associations acquiring all or parts of institutions that address this need in their particular field.) Even so, there is room for significantly tighter academic-association collaboration than exists in most fields and industries around curriculum development and onboarding into the relevant career paths.

And, of course, college is not graduate school and it does not represent the research role of universities – again, both areas in which there is greater opportunity for academic-association collaboration.

Employers, too, are a target for increased collaboration. While many associations do maintain employer relationships, we have found that there is very often a disconnect between the educational offerings and credentials associations develop and what employers actually value and need. And, in many instances, employers – and particularly decision makers at employers – are simply unaware of the educational options that associations in their field can or do offer.

One obvious starting point for forging greater connection among employers, academia, and associations would be for associations to get involved in the Open Skills Network, and initiative that already connects employers and higher education but that has little, if any, association presence.

Last but not least, everything I have covered here requires a re-thinking of the relationship between associations and the subject matter experts (SMEs) – often volunteers – who create and deliver much of association education. Our experience suggests that the bar will need to be raised significantly for the teaching and facilitation skills required of SMEs. This is part of the development of the “culture” that has already suggested, and it is one that will require more sophisticated recruitment efforts, coordinated training efforts, and potentially payment (or higher payment) of SMEs that make the cut.

The Need for Leadership

While the foundation for everything I have described here is already well in place, there is little reason to believe it will just “happen.”

Most of it goes against how things have been done in the past at associations and how most associations seem to conceive of themselves.

It goes against how education departments seem to be viewed at many associations – often as lower in the pecking order to events and membership – and the level of resources allocated to these departments in spite of their revenue-generating role.

And, of course, academia isn’t sitting still. While there may be issues with the traditional college degree programs, continuing education is rapidly evolving to a new level at many institutions. In combination with alumni programs and the types of relationships with employers I have already suggested, they are well positioned themselves to play a leading role – perhaps the leading role – in the third sector.

None of which is to suggest that this is a competition. The reality is that, if academic continuing education and associations were both to emerge as clear leaders of a vibrant third sector – ideally with strong collaboration between them – that would be a win for everyone evolved.

But for associations, that currently requires a surge in vision and leadership, one that could transform how we think about the traditional path from secondary education into career.

It’s a powerful idea. And it’s not so crazy.

Jeff

Title photo credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/university-lecture-campus-education-105709/

Related Leading Learning Posts

• Serving Education’s Third Sector
• Amplifying the “A” Factor

Related External Reading

• Is This the End of College as We Know It?
• Earning, Learning and Closing Skills Gaps With Apprenticeships
• More colleges project tuition revenue will decline: report
• College isn’t the solution for the racial wealth gap. It’s part of the problem.

The post Could Associations Replace College? (Take 2) appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

I stick by this definition, but I’ve also come to realize that it may represent learning as too much about adding. In reality, learning – if it is truly going to lead to positive change and growth – is just as much about subtracting.

There is after all, nothing to say that whatever we learn is actually right. We may mis-learn in the first place. In other words, acquire knowledge, skills, behaviors, or attitudes that are simply wrong, or at least not fully right.

Or, maybe we had it right, but the world around us has changed, so what we learned no longer serves us or others well.

In any of these cases, we must unlearn. We must reverse or significantly redirect the process of transforming information and experience into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes.

I’ve read other definitions that suggest that unlearning requires actually removing what you’ve learned from memory. That’s a steep requirement, and I don’t think it is actually achievable. But I do think there are specific requirements for successfully unlearning something.

What unlearning requires

I see three basic requirements – the 3 Rs of unlearning:

Recognition

Consciousness that our current knowledge, skills, behaviors, or attitudes are no longer producing positive results (if they ever were)? In my experience, this is usually the hardest part.

Release

Letting go of what we have learned. Doing our best to stop doing whatever actions or activities our learning has led to and becoming available for new learning. (Charles Duhigg’s work on habits is very helpful here.)

Replacement

Letting go is, of course, usually really hard to do. While we never truly erase what we have learned before, we can replace it or modify it with new learning, learning that serves us and others well.

None of this easy. Indeed, unlearning is usually significantly harder than learning. But the good news is that many of the same practices – mindfulness and curiosity, for example – apply.

The trick, of course, is to apply them.

The post What is unlearning and what does it require? appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

I like to revisit periodically the concept of “leading learning” to reflect on what it means. Our current context seems like a particularly important one for doing this.

A significant part of leadership, it seems to me, is to help people make their way into the future successfully. We can’t, of course, predict the future, but we can see the “accelerating present,” as Rohit Bhargava, long-term friend of Leading Learning, likes to put it. (Listen to Rohit here.)

Three aspects of the accelerating present jump out at me currently:

The need for more sustainable and accessible forms of connecting and convening

This need has been part of the accelerating present for quite a while. The emergence of COVID-19 has just made it glaringly apparent. Irrespective of dangerous viruses (which experts have been predicting for years would emerge), there has always been a disconnect between the need to address climate issues and the amount of waste created by face-to-face events. Just as important, we know many people simply can’t and don’t attend face-to-face events for a range of reasons. As a learning format, they are inaccessible to many, if not most, of the people we purport to serve.

Virtual conferences – which many are now scrambling to get their arms around – are one possible solution, if done well, but my hope is that in the shift toward virtual we also shift toward less of an emphasis on learning as an event and start realizing the full potential for learning as a process that appropriate technology platforms – like, for example, online community platforms – can make possible.

The need to meaningfully address disruption and displacement in employment

Artificial intelligence is just the latest of many changes that have impacted the nature of work over the course of recent decades. We’ve known for years that people change jobs more often than ever, that the requirements for specific jobs can shift frequently, and that entire professions can be reshaped – if not eliminated – rapidly by outsourcing, offshoring, robotics, and other forces.

Anticipating the learning – and unlearning – needed to navigate these changes is arguably the most important aspect of leading learning. And clarity is arguably the greatest service we can provide our learners, which is one reason I’ve been a big advocate of developing pathways for learners to follow (like, for example, NIGP has done).

But pathways, by their nature, are about what is known. So, at best, they are only a partial solution. We must also address …

The need to navigate “wicked” learning environments

The concept of “wicked” learning environments comes from psychologist Robin Hogarth. As opposed to “kind” environments in which clear patterns emerge and feedback from experience reliably contributes to improved performance, wicked environments don’t provide automatic or reliable feedback, making it difficult to learn and improve.

Even in relatively straight forward jobs – say, transcription or fire fighting – the pace of technological change alone often puts people into unexpectedly wicked environments. And, of course, many professions – most of the medical profession, for example – have always had major wicked aspects to them.

Traditional education and training tend to be quite limited in their ability to address wickedness. What’s needed is a different mindset – a true learning mindset – and an ability to leverage often much messier approaches like social and self-directed learning. In other words, we must prepare and support our learners in learning effectively without us.

And that, perhaps, is the ultimate test of leadership.

The post Where Learning Leadership Is Needed Now appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

There are three broad levels at which educational products and experiences deliver value: inform, perform, and transform.* An appreciation of them is essential not only for pricing, but for formulating a successful education business strategy.

Inform

Educational products at this level primarily communicate information. They speak to the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge and comprehension. When well-designed, they help learners acquire knowledge efficiently and effectively, in a manner that supports retention. When not well-designed, any learning that happens is driven mostly by the learner’s own motivation and ability to draw connections and apply the information.

These experiences are not without value, but they are inherently of lower value than experiences that are designed to drive higher level learning outcomes and create substantive change. This is true even if the information is timely and delivered by a recognized expert.

The vast majority of Webinars, as an example, fall in this camp. As most organizations recognize, it is increasingly difficult to charge learners very much, if at all, for experiences in this category.

Perform

Experiences in this category are designed to drive not just a change in knowledge, but in the ability to actively apply that knowledge. They support learners in acquiring new skills and behaviors. They are about performance.

Perform experiences tend to align with the middle levels of Bloom’s taxonomy: application and analysis. They achieve Kirkpatrick level 2 (learning) and have the potential, when well designed and facilitated, to achieve level 3 (behavior).

Perform experiences are of inherently higher value than Inform experiences. They also tend to be more time and labor intensive to design and deliver than Inform experiences, but the design can be leveraged, and much of the work involved in delivery can and should be shared with the learner. Organizations can charge significantly more for these types of learning experiences, they tend to be more shielded from competition than Inform experiences, and the ROI for all involved in much higher.

Project-based learning and workshops that involved significant hands-on application are examples of Perform experiences.

Transform

Experiences at this level drive deep, long-term change in the learner. By extension, they tend to impact the context in which the learner performs – e.g., the organization and even the entire field or industry in which the learner works.

You might think of transformational learning as akin to transformational leadership, which goes beyond telling (instructing) people on what to do and taps into the motivations they have for leading themselves. Transform experience inspire and equip the learner to become a catalyst for further learning – both for herself and for others with whom she interacts.

Transform experiences can be “epiphanic,” meaning they happen quickly, through a flash of insight. But even these flashes of insight are usually long in coming, and Transform experiences, in general, tend to take time and tend to be cumulative in nature. More often than not, they are built upon well-designed Inform and Perform experiences that are united by a common vision and strategy. But they also allow for a significant degree of serendipity and outright chaos – plenty of opportunities for learners to experiment, practice, take risks, fail, and try again.

To stay with the Bloom’s connection, these are experiences that align with the synthesis and evaluation levels. In Kirkpatrick, they are experiences that reach the Behavior and Results levels.

In theory, degree programs and certification programs should offer opportunities for transformational learning, though it is certainly questionable whether most do. The whole move towards practice improvement and quality improvement in the medical field, I would argue, falls in the Transform category, at least to the extent that it is executed well.

Why it matters

How your educational products are perceived and how much you will be able to charge for them is directly related to the categories of value into which they fall. Most organizations at this point are starting to realize, for example, that it is harder and harder to charge significantly, if at all, for products that fall in the Inform camp. Simultaneously, many are realizing – if they are really honest in their assessment – that most of their products fall in this camp.

Not that there is anything wrong with Inform products. They may be particularly appropriate for novices, for example, or for any learners who are capable of and motivated to run with the information provided.

In general, though, organizations should aim to create a portfolio of learning products that offers options in each category. By doing this, you offer ways for prospective learners to engage with your offerings at varying value and price levels – as suggested by the Value Ramp. You also ensure that you have groups of products that are less susceptible to the significant downward price pressure that is common in the Inform category.

So, it’s worth getting the right group of people in the room at your organization, throwing these three categories – Inform, Perform, and Transform – up on a whiteboard, and asking “How are we doing in each of these categories of value?”

I guarantee the discussion that follows will be interesting and productive.

Jeff

* – While I don’t want to imply they would agree with the way I use it here, I am indebted to Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard Mayer for the “inform/perform” distinction. These are terms they use to distinguish between different types of training experiences. I have referenced this distinction before in Webinar Strategy – The Inform/Perform Distinction. The addition of “Transform” is my own.

See also:

• If you want to sell it, don’t call it a Webinar

The original version  of this post was published on the Tagoras blog on Mar 10, 2014.

The post Inform. Perform. Transform. What do your educational offerings do? appeared first on Jeff Cobb.

How Are They Different?

I’ve previously defined learning as:

the lifelong process of transforming information and experience into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes

Education is just one option within this process. It is one approach to learning among many others. And, it’s usually a systematized approach that is developed, structured, and directed by people other than ourselves.

Education tends to be about taking classes, earning credentials, acquiring and proving the acquisition of knowledge and skills.

By its very nature, education also tends to be conservative (in the non-political sense). It passes along and preserves what is already known. This sort of conservatism is at the very heart of traditional teaching.

Learning, on the other hand, is inherently progressive. It is always in the process of happening. The person who is learning is actively changing. Learning causes change, and change causes learning.

Learning is also a mindset.

Ideally, it’s what we bring to education, what helps us to move beyond what was and what is to what could be. There are so many ways in which we learn. Sometimes these are represented in education; very often they are under-represented or even actively suppressed.

Why does it matter?

There is nothing inherently negative about education. We very often need structures and systems to help us learn. But problems arise when we start treating education and learning as the same thing.

Why?

Well, when we equate learning with education, we’re more likely to focus on generating answers. On providing structure; on optimizing for performance and achievement.

Again, that’s not inherently bad, but we tend to over do it. We jump to conclusions too early and we inevitably provide solutions that work for only a subset – often a minority – of those we aim to serve, and often only for a limited time. Worse, we provide answers that may be harmful to many of those we aim to serve. We wind up with a situation analogous to what we have in health care (at least in the U.S.) where interventions and treatments are prioritized over prevention and root causes.

Real learning, on the other hand, is about questions, about navigating ambiguity. To reference my definition again, it is as much about attitude and behavior as it is about knowledge and skills. Arguably it is more about these things in our current environment.

When we emphasize education as an approach to learning, our bias is to focus too much on cognition. Again, the result is analogous to the  situation in healthcare, where we tend to overemphasize the biological at the expense of the psychological and social, not fully appreciating that health – like learning – is multi-faceted.

We also tend to shift responsibility – and with it, freedom – away from the learner when we confuse education with learning. Too much responsibility gets placed on teachers and institutions, not enough on learners. As a result, we don’t really provide learners with the support they need. But learning doesn’t really happen without the learner’s involvement and effort, and the more the learner can take  responsibility for the  involvement and effort, the better.

In general, we simply miss a lot when we equate education with learning. Education isn’t the answer to everything. In fact, it is arguably becoming much less important, at least in its usual, traditional forms. Given the pace at which knowledge now flows and changes, and the ability for machines to learn nearly anything that has been systematized and structured, we arguably can’t educate ourselves fast enough.

Education remains useful, but learning is what is really needed to navigate our current world.

What needs to change?

So, if learning and education are different, and the difference matters, what needs to change?

For starters, we – and particularly those in positions of influence – need to be more careful about language, more careful not to use the words “learning” and “education” interchangeably, but rather to use each in its proper place. This may seem like a trivial or pedantic point, but language matters. Language shapes the world.

Next, we – as societies, as businesses, and certainly as educators – need to put much more emphasis on real learning, including educating (yes, that would be the proper word here) people about learning, about how to learn. As Malcom Knowles  put it, it’s a tragic fact that most of us know only how to be taught. That needs to change.

Those of us in traditional educational roles – meaning not just teachers, but also parents, managers, and leaders of every stripe – need to focus less on teaching in the traditional sense and more on allowing for and generating contexts in which learning can happen. Allowing for ambiguity, for wasting of time, for questioning, risk taking, and failure. (All of the cliches of the business world apply here because business, when it is actually pursued productively, is a learning activity.)

Finally (for now), we need to appreciate much more deeply the degree to which learning and life are interwoven. Learning is not confined within the walls of an institution or the structure of a class. It happens in the flow of life. It is rooted in physicality and emotion as much as in cognition. When we shift to seeing learning in this way, it becomes much easier to recognize and take advantage of the myriad opportunities for learning that we encounter daily.

Some of these opportunities will, of course, arise in the context education. But the vast majority will not – because education and learning are simply not the same thing.

JTC

See also:

• This Is Learning
• Can we educate ourselves fast enough?
• 6 Disciplines of the True Learning Mindset

The post Learning vs. Education appeared first on Jeff Cobb.