You can’t buy what you don’t know
04 September 2026
Andrew Crisp considers findings from the new Future of Lifelong and Executive Education report which suggests universities and business schools need to better communicate their offer.
Imagine this. You’re 40 years old, perhaps you never went to university, and if you did, all you saw when you were there were undergraduate degrees. You’ve just started a business, perhaps working for yourself, but you need some help getting to grips with accounting or perhaps how to use AI in your business. May be you think about the university where you studied, but when you land on the home page looking for short courses, almost all you see is 18 year olds, with laptops, outside on a sunny campus. And if you do, by sheer persistence, find the short course you’re after, it’s only available twice a year during working hours.
In a world where lifelong and executive education is a growth market in higher education, few universities have so far worked out how to effectively communicate and position their offer. The latest Future of Lifelong and Executive Education report reveals several reasons why learners find it difficult to use universities and business schools – 21% believe universities only offer degrees when they want a short course, 19% consider them too theoretical, 17% suggest they are not available near where they live/work and the same percentage believe they have no online offer. On top of all this, 35%, perhaps only seeing the price tag for degrees, believe universities and business schools are too expensive for lifelong and executive education.
Among employers, the story is little better. One in six (16%) indicate that they weren’t aware that business schools/universities offered executive and management development programmes and 25% simply think other providers offer programmes which better meet their development needs. An absence of specific expertise, approaches that are too theoretical, no online offer, too much bureaucracy and slow responses to enquiries are all cited as problems by more than 1 in 7 employers.
And then there is the question of qualifications, or not in many cases. For learners, there is interest in degrees, but not necessarily in the format that many institutions deliver. Instead, 22% want to complete modules with academic credit that can be added to one another to complete a degree, a flexible, affordable and stackable approach, ahead of a traditional Master’s degree and well ahead of both MBAs and Executive MBAs.
Almost twice as many learners (20%) would consider a certificate of completion from a learning provider, but with no academic credit, as would consider an MBA (11%). Yet when individuals are asked why they would consider using a university or business schools, their top answer, mentioned by 42% of respondents, is that University/business school qualifications are recognised by employers. In some cases, that will mean a degree, but increasingly that reputation will also mean the brand of the institution; a brand which says externally accredited quality, positioned as a developer of knowledge not just a provider of knowledge, which has high quality faculty delivering courses and can draw on the breadth of an institution for a variety of courses.
It doesn’t mean that all qualifications are recognised by employers. Interest in microcredentials, whether from employers or learners, remains limited, with only 11% of each groups considering them, unchanged from the previous study two years ago. Again, it may be a communication not a credential problem. Learners and employers simply don’t know what is meant by a microcredential – is it part of a degree, does it carry academic credit, what can I do with such a qualification?
Thinking that if you build it, learners and employers will simply flock to a particular business school or university for lifelong and executive education, is likely to lead to disappointment. A carefully crafted B2C and B2B offer are needed, with clear positioning of that offer. Sometimes, just growing awareness of what an institution provides is required to attract audiences who are very different from traditional undergraduates and postgraduates in their teens and early twenties.
This is the second in a series of articles that will be published on the CarringtonCrisp website over the coming months covering findings from The future of lifelong and executive education report 2026. To read more about the findings, download the free executive summary or purchase the full report at https://www.carringtoncrisp.com/intelligence/flee/