From Degrees to Skills: The Conversations Higher Education Needs to Be Having About Lifelong Learning

One of the first things I wanted to challenge during the webinar is the idea that lifelong learning starts once someone enters the workforce.

Personally, I don’t think it does. That’s why I introduced Sarah during the webinar. Sarah wasn’t just a fictional learner to guide the story. She represents thousands of learners who start developing skills long before they ever think about continuing education.

Throughout her studies she’s collecting much more than grades. She’s learning how to work in teams, how to deal with feedback, how to solve problems, how to communicate and how to reflect on her own development. The more I speak with institutions, the more I see them asking the same question: how do we help learners actually demonstrate those skills?

That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing growing interest in portfolio-based learning. Not because grades have become less important, but because grades only tell part of the story. Employers increasingly want to understand what someone can actually do, how they’ve grown over time and how they apply their knowledge in practice.

For me, that mindset is where lifelong learning really starts.

Perhaps instead of asking how many courses someone completed, we should be asking what skills they’ve developed, how confident they are applying those skills and how they can demonstrate them.

That shift isn’t just important for learners. It’s equally important for employers who are trying to recruit talent and for institutions that want to demonstrate the impact of their education.

Another topic that generated a lot of discussion was the technology and infrastructure needed to support lifelong learning.

One thing I have learned over the past fifteen years in EdTech is that every institution defines success differently. One institution wants to increase revenue, another wants to expand employer partnerships, another wants to reach underserved communities, while someone else is focused on learner retention.

The goals may differ, but the ingredients are remarkably similar. Every institution needs to support learners, manage programmes, connect systems, reduce administrative work and create an experience that encourages learners to come back.

That last point is one I find particularly interesting. We often spend a lot of time talking about attracting new learners, but returning learners are incredibly valuable. They’ve already experienced your institution. They know your quality. If their first experience is positive, the threshold to come back for another course becomes much lower.

Creating that seamless learner journey is becoming increasingly important, especially now that learners expect the same ease of use they experience in almost every other aspect of their lives.

One of the reasons I enjoy bringing together research and institutional stories is because research gives us direction, while institutions show us what that actually looks like in practice.

Take the University of California, Merced for example. One of the things I really appreciated about their contribution to the latest UPCEA research is that they started with their own community. Rather than immediately designing new programmes, they first looked at regional workforce needs, involved employers in the conversation and continuously reviewed whether their offerings were still relevant. That employer-first approach has contributed to significant growth in enrolments and certificates awarded. More importantly, it shows that listening is just as important as designing.

A completely different, but equally inspiring example is Jones College’s Online Workforce College in Mississippi. They have a team of just two people serving around 4,000 learners every year. That isn’t possible because they simply work harder. It’s possible because they’ve deliberately built an ecosystem that automates the right processes, creates stackable learning pathways and allows their team to focus on building relationships with employers and supporting learners. What I love most about their story is that everything starts with their community. They’re creating opportunities for people who might never have considered returning to education, and that’s exactly what lifelong learning should be about.

The University of Edinburgh offers another perspective. With 25 different schools, hundreds of courses and thousands of learners, their challenge isn’t launching programmes, it’s connecting them. By creating shared governance and making it easier for learners to continue their learning journey, they’ve built an environment where more than a third of learners return to take additional courses. To me, that’s one of the strongest indicators that lifelong learning isn’t just about attracting learners, it’s about giving them a reason to come back.

None of these institutions look exactly the same. None of them are using exactly the same approach. Yet they all reinforce the same message.

A couple of things were touched on again during this webinar which I think would be important facets for institutions to start talking about, because one thing I’ve learned over the years is that when you start talking about something, it starts living within your institution.

Lifelong learning should not be a separate strategy and it’s not ‘just continuing education’, ‘just employer engagement’ or certainly not ‘just technology’. It’s all of those things working together to support learners throughout their lives.

The same applies to employer engagement. It shouldn’t be something that only one department thinks about. It should become part of the conversation across continuing education, academic programmes, workforce development and institutional leadership.

The same applies to learner outcomes. We shouldn’t only ask how many learners enrolled or completed a programme. We should also be asking whether they gained the skills they were hoping for, whether employers saw value, whether learners came back for more learning and whether, together, we’re genuinely making a difference.

That’s also why I touched on the importance of feedback during the webinar. Whether that’s learner feedback, employer feedback or longer-term career outcomes, we’re moving towards a world where institutions increasingly need to demonstrate the impact of what they do. Not just because governments and funding models are asking for it, but because it helps us build better learning experiences in the first place.

For me, that’s probably the biggest takeaway from this webinar. The future of lifelong learning isn’t about offering more courses. It’s about building an ecosystem where learners, employers and institutions continue learning from one another.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be taking a much deeper dive into two of the research reports discussed during the webinar. One explores why Best-of-Breed ecosystems are becoming increasingly important for continuing education, while the other looks at how institutions can strengthen employer engagement by starting with workforce needs instead of programmes.

My hope is that these conversations don’t stop with a webinar or a blog. I hope they spark discussions within your own institution, because that’s often where the best ideas begin.