Before Investing in New Technology, Start with People: 6 Steps to Improve Continuing Education

Learn how to uncover hidden administrative work, prioritize improvements, and build more scalable operations and workflows, based on insights shared during our recent webinar with UChicago Professional.

Continuing education teams want to reach more learners, develop new programs, and respond to a changing workforce needs. While growth brings new opportunities, it also creates more work behind the scenes. Every additional registration involves people and processes that ensure learners can successfully enroll, access their courses, and complete their learning experience.

When growth starts bringing more emails, manual checks, and information moving between systems, processes that worked well for 50 learners may become difficult to manage at 1,000. When these challenges emerge, it can be tempting to start looking for new technology. But before comparing platforms, how do you determine what needs to change? And how do you make sure you are addressing the challenges that matter most to learners and staff?

In our recent webinar with Yacob Abdi, Associate Director, Program Operations and Systems from UChicago Professional, we explored an approach that starts with people, then looks at process and data, before turning to technology.

Drawing on UChicago Professional’s approach, we have brought together six practical steps institutions can use to evaluate their workflows, identify opportunities for improvement, and decide where to begin.

These steps provide a starting point for a conversation with your team. Every institution has its own priorities and constraints, but we believe the people experiencing the work should help shape both the evaluation and the decisions that follow.

A process can look perfectly reasonable on paper and still create frustration every day. The colleagues answering learner questions, checking payments, or correcting records, often have the clearest understanding of where processes create unnecessary work.

Start by bringing those colleagues into the conversation, including the teams involved when work moves between departments. Ask what takes time, what regularly goes wrong, and where they need to step in to keep things moving. Equally important is understanding the learner perspective, through feedback, support questions, or conversations about their experience.

As Yacob highlighted during the webinar, institutions may organize their work across registration, finance, IT, and learner support, but learners experience these functions as one institution. Consider a learner who successfully registers and pays for a course but cannot access Canvas LMS. Internally, the issue may be related to an integration or an administrative handoff. From the learner’s perspective, the problem is much simpler: they paid for a course and cannot access it.

Putting people first means considering both experiences. Staff can help identify where the workflows create pressure, while learners can help us understand the effect of that pressure. Together, those perspectives give a much clearer picture of what needs attention.

One of the most important insights from the webinar was how much administrative work can remain invisible, even within the teams performing it. Many small tasks become such a routine part of the day that staff may no longer think to mention them. Yet, as enrollment grows, these seemingly minor actions can create a significant workload.

This challenge also comes up frequently in conversations within the UPCEA community. During the webinar, we asked Yacob how institutions can uncover this hidden work, especially the small tasks and workarounds that staff have become so accustomed to that they may no longer recognize them as problems.

Yacob recommended breaking each learner action down into smaller pieces and following what happens afterward:

• What does the learner do?
• What actions does that trigger for staff?
• Which systems are involved?
• Where does the information move?
• What communication needs to happen?

That level of detail helps reveal work we take for granted or do not think of as particularly time-consuming.

Consider course registration as an example. A learner sees a confirmation and assumes they are ready to begin. Behind the scenes, someone may still be verifying payment, updating a record, checking Canvas LMS enrollment, sending instructions, and reconciling the transaction.

Yacob illustrated this with a simple example: just ten minutes of work behind each registration adds up to more than 166 hours across 1,000 registrations. This shows how seemingly small tasks can create a significant workload as enrollment grows.

The challenge is that this work often remains hidden precisely because people are making things run smoothly. A learner receives their confirmation because a colleague noticed it had not been sent. Information ends up in the right place because someone manually transferred it . The process appears to work, while the effort needed to keep it working remains much less visible and straining.

A practical way to explore this is to ask a colleague to walk through a recent registration, course change, or certificate request. Ask them to show the extra checks, the spreadsheet, the follow-up emails, and workarounds that may not appear in formal process documentation.

As Yacob explained, delayed communication, information saved in different places, or a confirmation that does not happen automatically can point you towards friction. Write those moments down as you find them.

Pay attention to how often each action occurs and approximately how long it takes. A five-minute task repeated hundreds of times can represent a significant opportunity for improvement. Understanding that repetition gives you a better basis for deciding what deserves attention.

Making this work visible is also an opportunity to recognize the knowledge and effort staff contribute to keeping operations running.

After mapping a workflow, it can be tempting to look at every manual action as something to automate. First, ask why each step exists and whether it still serves a purpose.

After mapping a workflow, it can be tempting to look at every manual action as something to automate. First, ask why each step exists and whether it still serves a purpose.

Yacob shared the example of manually approving every registration. If most registrations follow the same rules and require no individual judgment, could they be automated, with staff reviewing the exceptions? The first step is understanding why the approval is needed in the first place.

Some steps are essential for protecting quality, meeting a requirement, or allowing staff to consider the learner’s individual circumstances. Others may have been introduced to solve a temporary problem and remained long after that problem was resolved. Understanding the difference takes discussion, especially when several departments are involved.

Review each step to determine whether it should be kept, simplified, removed or automated, and where human judgment should remain. This helps define a more efficient workflow before evaluating technology, while freeing up staff to focus on situations that benefit from personal attention and expertise.

Even a well-designed workflow can become difficult when people are unsure where the correct information lives or who is responsible for the next action.

Consider a learner changing their email address. It may be stored in the registration platform, the learning management system, the CRM, and a spreadsheet. If the records don’t match, which system should be considered the source of truth? Who is responsible for ensuring the updated information reaches all the relevant systems?

UChicago Professional’s discussion of system roles offers a useful way to examine this. For each important system, establish its purpose, the information it owns, and how it connects with other systems. Then clarify who is responsible for the handoffs and for resolving an exception.

This can sound technical, but it directly affects both staff and learners. Without clear responsibilities, staff can spend unnecessary time checking records and resolving inconsistencies, while learners may face delays or have to provide the same information multiple times. Clarifying these roles helps address operational friction before adding another platform to the mix.

Once you begin examining workflows in detail, you’ll likely identify more opportunities for improvement than your team can realistically address at once, so deciding what comes first matters.

During the webinar, Yacob introduced UChicago Professional’s workflow prioritization approach, which evaluates opportunities using five criteria:

• Learner impact: How much would the improvement benefit the learner experience?
• Volume and reach: How frequently does the workflow occur, and how many people does it affect?
• Time and cost savings: How much administrative effort or expense could be reduced?
• Strategic alignment: How closely does the improvement support institutional or departmental goals?
• Effort to improve: How difficult would it be to implement the change?

The first four criteria help determine the potential value of an improvement, while the fifth considers the effort required to achieve it. Once workflows have been evaluated, a value-versus-effort matrix helps teams decide which improvements to tackle first. It shows which changes could deliver meaningful benefits with relatively little effort and which may require more time, resources, or coordination.

During the webinar, Yacob illustrated this by comparing two workflows: course reminders and refund processing. Automating course reminders could reduce repetitive administrative work and may be relatively easy to implement, making it a potential quick win. Improving refund processing could also significantly benefit learners, but it may involve financial policies, multiple systems, and additional risks. As a result, it could require more planning and coordination. Both improvements may be worthwhile, but they don’t necessarily need to happen at the same time. The matrix helps teams identify a sensible order: start with high-value improvements that are easier to implement, while planning more complex initiatives separately.

However, prioritization isn’t simply about choosing the workflow with the highest score. As Yacob emphasized, the goal is to support a structured discussion about where improvements can create the most meaningful value.

Teams should also consider factors such as risk and dependencies. For example, a workflow that affects relatively few learners may still deserve early attention if errors could have serious consequences for their experience.

Ultimately, the matrix is a decision-making tool, not a rigid formula. It helps institutions balance potential benefits with the practical effort required to achieve them.

Ready to prioritize improvements at your institution? Download UChicago Professional’s Workflow Prioritization Matrix to evaluate your workflows, compare value and effort, and identify where to focus first.

Improving continuing education operations doesn’t have to begin with a complete redesign of your administrative ecosystem. Choose one workflow where the value is clear, and the effort is manageable. UChicago Professional’s advice was to begin on a smaller scale, understand the friction, and propose one meaningful improvement.

Before making changes, decide how you’ll measure success. Depending on the workflow, that could mean fewer manual checks, a shorter wait for access, fewer repeated learner questions, or less time spent correcting information. Establish what happens today so that the team has something useful to compare it with.

Once the change is in place, gather feedback from the people involved.

Has it made staff’s work easier? Are learners receiving what they need at the right moment? Has unnecessary work been eliminated, or has it simply shifted to another team? These conversations can reveal things that a measure of time saved alone would miss.

Finally, consider whether the revised workflow will hold up as demand grows. During the webinar, Yacob posed an important question: If enrollment doubled next year, which administrative workflow would you wish you had redesigned today? It is a helpful question for deciding where to start, and for checking whether a proposed improvement prepares your team for the growth you want.

Improving continuing education operations isn’t simply about reducing administrative tasks or introducing new technology. Evaluating workflows takes time, especially when teams involved are already busy. However, involving the people who work with these processes every day helps institutions make decisions based on what actually happens, rather than what a system demonstration suggests might be possible.

One of the strongest messages from UChicago Professional’s experience is the importance of using people’s time where it creates the most value. Simplifying repetitive administrative work allows staff to make room for learner support, problem-solving, and building relationships. That is an outcome worth keeping in view throughout the evaluation.

At Eduframe, this is how we believe conversations about technology should begin. Understanding the people, workflows, and information involved helps identify where technology can make a meaningful difference, whether that’s improving registration, administration, or connecting systems. It gives both the institution and our team a clearer basis for deciding what technology needs to achieve and how it can support the institution’s goals.