Executive Education Has a Talent Advantage. Are Universities Making the Most of It?
This insight comes from an in-depth research report, “University Executive Education Talent and the New World of Work,” written by Jennifer Stine and Kelly Bean and published by UNICON. You can download a copy of this report here.
In this article:
Executive education offers a compelling combination of mission, learning, and complex work.
Mid-career talent remains one of the field’s biggest development challenges.
Career development may be better understood as a growth journey than a traditional ladder.
Learning already happens constantly in executive education. The opportunity is to make it more intentional.
Developing the people behind executive education is increasingly important to building strong, innovative programs.
University executive education is in the business of developing talent.
Every year, executive education teams design sophisticated learning experiences for executives and organizations. They think carefully about capabilities, learning journeys, coaching, reflection, experiential learning, and how people apply what they learn back at work.
But how often do executive education organizations apply the same level of attention to developing their own people?
That was one of the questions that emerged from research I conducted with Kelly Bean for UNICON on University Executive Education Talent and the New World of Work. We looked at global workforce trends and interviewed executive education leaders and professionals about hiring, retention, skills, career development, and leadership.
What we found was encouraging. Executive education has some significant advantages in the competition for talent.
It also has opportunities to do much more.
Executive Education Has a Strong Talent Proposition
Executive education organizations generally cannot compete with corporations or consulting firms on compensation alone. But they have something many employers are working hard to create: meaningful work.
Mission and purpose emerged repeatedly in our research as reasons people enter and remain in the field. People value being part of an educational institution and contributing to work that helps others learn, grow, and lead more effectively.
Executive education also offers another increasingly valuable benefit: learning in the flow of work.
The work itself is developmental. Team members interact with faculty, executives, corporate learning leaders, and colleagues with different areas of expertise. They encounter new industries and business problems. They see leadership and management ideas being taught and applied. And because many executive education organizations operate with relatively lean teams, people often have opportunities to stretch beyond narrowly defined roles.
These are significant advantages in a labor market where people increasingly value meaningful work, flexibility, and opportunities to grow.
But advantages only matter if institutions use them intentionally.
The Mid-Career Challenge
One of the clearest findings from our research was that the hardest talent challenge was not necessarily finding people at the entry level. It was developing and retaining people in the middle.
The progression from program coordination and operations into more senior program roles can require a substantial leap in capability. A successful program director may need to understand operations while also managing clients, developing business, working effectively with faculty, contributing to learning design, and navigating a complex university environment.
One interviewee described this combination as the “red thread” of executive education: the ability to move from an exploratory client conversation through business development, learning design, faculty engagement, program delivery, and assessment. Cranfield School of Management had created a nine-month internal development experience specifically to help employees build these capabilities.
These skills are difficult to find because they cross traditional professional boundaries.
The strongest executive education professionals are not simply excellent program managers, salespeople, learning designers, or relationship managers. They connect those capabilities.
That suggests a different talent strategy. Rather than continually searching externally for people who already possess this unusual combination, institutions can become much more deliberate about creating opportunities for promising employees to develop it.
From Career Ladders to Growth Journeys
There is another complication: executive education organizations are often relatively small. There simply may not be another position available when a talented employee is ready for the next challenge. Senior positions turn over infrequently, further limiting traditional advancement opportunities. That makes the conventional idea of a career ladder particularly limiting.
One idea that resonated strongly when we presented this research was reframing career paths as “growth journeys” or “experience paths.”
That shift sounds small, but it opens up a much richer set of possibilities.
Development might include leading a new type of program, participating in a client engagement, shadowing a colleague, learning more about instructional design, working with a different faculty group, taking a university course, joining a cross-functional initiative, participating in an industry association, or even spending time in another organization.
Our research uncovered an especially interesting example: an executive education organization and a professional services client created a talent exchange in which employees spent time working in one another’s learning organizations. Experiences like these build capability even when a promotion is not immediately available. They also acknowledge something important about careers today: growth does not always mean moving upward.
Careers Can Move Across Organizational Boundaries
Executive education sits at an unusual intersection of academia and business. That creates career possibilities that extend well beyond the traditional university hierarchy.
Our research included people whose careers moved between universities, corporate learning, consulting, EdTech, and other parts of the education ecosystem. These moves were not necessarily departures from a career path. They were often part of the path.
For executive education leaders, this creates an opportunity to think differently about talent development. Instead of worrying that developing people will make them more marketable elsewhere, organizations can help employees build broader networks and capabilities, including relationships with clients and corporate learning organizations. Some people will leave. Others may eventually return with entirely new skills and perspectives.
The goal should not be to keep every talented person indefinitely. It should be to create an environment where talented people continue to grow and where the organization benefits from that growth while they are there.
Make the Learning That Already Happens More Intentional
Perhaps the biggest opportunity does not require creating an entirely new talent development infrastructure.
Much of the learning is already happening. People sit in executive education classrooms and hear world-class faculty. They solve unexpected problems during program delivery. They work with sophisticated clients. They observe colleagues navigating difficult faculty and stakeholder relationships. They learn new industries and encounter new technologies.
But experience does not automatically become development. Leaders can help employees turn those experiences into learning by creating opportunities for reflection, coaching, mentoring, feedback, and increasingly challenging assignments.
The research pointed to practices ranging from structured career conversations and mentoring to internal development programs and cross-organizational talent exchanges.
The shift is from assuming people will develop because they are surrounded by learning to designing the employee experience so that development actually happens.
Don't Forget the Top of the House
This same thinking should extend to executive education leaders themselves. Running an executive education organization requires much more than expertise in education. Senior leaders may be responsible for strategy, P&L, business development, client relationships, faculty relationships, innovation, HR, and organizational leadership.
Yet our research found that none of the people we interviewed was aware of active succession planning within their executive education organizations. That represents both a risk and an opportunity.
Developing the next generation of executive education leaders requires identifying high-potential people earlier and deliberately expanding their exposure to the business, financial, strategic, and leadership dimensions of the work. Succession should not begin when a senior leader announces that they are leaving.
Develop Your Team Like You Develop Your Participants
Executive education has a remarkable built-in advantage. It operates inside institutions devoted to learning. Its employees work alongside experts in leadership, strategy, organizations, technology, and human development. And its work exposes people continuously to new ideas, organizations, and challenges.
The opportunity is to turn that environment into a more deliberate talent strategy. That means asking:
Where are our biggest future capability gaps?
Which experiences will help junior employees begin building mid-career capabilities?
How can people continue growing when a promotion is not available?
What are employees learning through their work, and how are we helping them recognize and build on that learning?
Who could lead this organization in the future, and what experiences do they need now?
In the original report, we concluded by encouraging leaders to share career stories, create mentoring and growth opportunities, celebrate individual contributions, work creatively with university HR, learn from clients, build broad professional networks, and encourage people to take charge of their own development.
Executive education organizations spend enormous energy helping other organizations build their talent. There is an opportunity to bring that same creativity, intentionality, and commitment to learning home.
How ALG Can Help
Academic Leadership Group works with universities and higher education organizations to strengthen the people and teams responsible for learning innovation.
We can help executive and professional education leaders assess the capabilities their organizations will need next, develop leadership and talent strategies, create growth experiences for emerging leaders, strengthen teams, and design coaching and development programs around the real challenges people encounter in their work.
Our approach starts with the work itself: what your organization is trying to accomplish, the capabilities required to get there, and the experiences that will help people develop those capabilities.
If you are thinking about how to build the team your executive education organization needs next, we would welcome the conversation.