If you thought it was difficult to start a new business in the education space, you'd be right for sure. But it's even harder to do something in the adult education space and that's very unfortunate because we - as a country - are in dire need of more companies providing cost-effective and results-oriented retraining and up-skilling programs especially to adult learners whether they be career changers, new job seekers, or just folks whose continued employment and value to their companies is in question because their own skills haven't kept up with the growing technical and digital requirements of their jobs.
Having large numbers of people in any of these three particular populations sitting on the sidelines looking for new opportunities without having the requisite training for the new positions which are available and currently going unfilled represents major losses to our economy - not merely because these individuals aren't working - but also because they represent a wealth of accumulated institutional knowledge that will be lost if we can't figure out how to connect and enable them with the new technologies and move them and their aggregated wisdom forward and into the digital economy. So creating better and more effective systems of adult education and re-skilling are critical, but they're hard and especially hard for startups mainly for one overwhelming reason.
I call it the "curse of cohorts" and it's a bitch. School teachers and even college professors by and large have it easy in the cohort department. As I used to tell my faculty, sadly we keep getting older while the students every year are the same age and, of course, that's precisely the point. Our traditional education system does the selection, segmentation and other sorting for us so basically the majority of students in any class are roughly the same in terms of demographics, prior experience and education, and - maybe most importantly - expectations and aspirations. Classes are for all intents and purposes cohorts by definition and can be addressed and dealt with from a curricular perspective in a single and consistent fashion.
I don't mean that their individual needs are the same or that they will be learning in the same way or that they should even be taught in the same manner because differentiated learning is the future of all education. And don't get me started on how stupid the "one size fits all" model of teaching is. But at least in a given group within a given class, there will be some prerequisites and some fundamental external and known alignments. And we also know for sure that their common and overriding objective is to complete the class and graduate.
Unfortunately when you get to adult education, it’s a vastly different ballgame. It’s almost impossible to figure out who will respond to your ads (in whatever channels you launch them) and realistically what each and every one of the prospects will be expecting to get in the class and to get out of the class. I used to joke that, if you announced a class on Excel, you’d have respondents looking for a new headache cure; rank beginners who’d never used a spreadsheet; and masters looking for new strategies to crank up their pivot tables, etc. A course on Ruby on Rails would unearth model railroaders and aspiring gemologists among others searching for the keys to the kingdom.
And those are just the types of disconnects that arise regularly over subject matter and course materials and coverage. When you add to that unwieldy mess, the additional and considerable confusion over outcomes, next steps, and what the extent of the actual preparation is expected to be, it’s amazing that anyone can manage this process at all. Some of the students expect that 12 weeks of coding instruction will turn them into entrepreneurs; others plan to immediately jump into a mid-level, high-paying programming job at a major corporation, and still others think that - with enough passion and energy - you can actually wish a real business into existence. Turning even the best ideas into invoices takes a lot more than that. In fact, the matchmaking function itself may be the absolutely hardest part of building a sustainable and profitable adult education business.
Frankly, if I had the time, I’d quickly build a national registry of the course offerings from all the different providers in every city that would be the “go-to”, one-stop place to find exactly what you were looking for. It would have its own tipping-point mechanism built right in so that each specific class would launch and go forward only after the minimum required number of appropriate and interested people had actually signed up for it. Hard to believe that it doesn’t already exist, and yet, it doesn’t. But, alas, that’s for another day.
Right now, if you're intent on trying to help in this space, I've got plenty of scars, lots of experience, and some specific tips for you.
(1) Find A Channel (Outbound)
Trying to reach your cohort of ready, willing and able students (who are also qualified) among an unbelievably diverse population of potential adult learners who are hopefully interested in precisely your particular offering in a specific location and at fixed times and dates is an expensive and ridiculously expensive proposition and one which (if you were to tell the truth) has continual customer acquisition costs far in excess of what you can realistically charge a given student for your course offering. You’re not gonna make it up in the volume either. Because unlike a college or university, too many adult courses are one-off deals where there isn’t even a way to claim that you can amortize your acquisition costs over multiple sessions or courses which will eventually be taken by each person once you’ve incurred the cost to track them down and attract them to your program. This is much harder than finding a needle in a haystack – it’s more like continually sticking yourself with the needle and hoping that eventually you’ll get used to the pain.
So you need an outbound, cost-effective communication channel to reach your targets. You want to ride on someone else’s back and rely on their bucks to help you get the job done. This is a lot easier than you think because fashioning win-win partnerships these days are all the rage. In particular, membership organizations a (think AAA or AARP) are all under growing pressure to demonstrate the value they provide to their members in order to retain them when so many of the things they traditionally offered to their groups are now available elsewhere and often at no cost. So find yourself a free ride – associations, membership organizations, alumni groups, etc. and choose the ones most closely aligned to your offerings and see what happens.
(2) Find A Feeder (Inbound)
A staggering number of traditional schools (high schools, colleges and universities) aren’t giving their graduates the concrete and practical skills that these students need to secure one of the massive number of good-paying and challenging jobs which are being created in the digital economy every day. We need more vocational training at every level of the education chain and this is the precise niche that high-end, technical adult education programs can fill if we regard them as “finishing” schools and education extenders and enhancers rather than as places for grown-ups to occasionally pursue their hobbies, dreams and passions.
The traditional schools aren’t going to get around to changing their programs any time soon (the community colleges are actually beating them to the punch), but their students (and graduates) are starting to get the picture and they make great targets for these kinds of programs even before they’re officially done with school. It’s easier than you would imagine to get the word out about what you’re doing on college campuses and much, much less expensive than other channels. Keep in mind that the students still do listen to certain of their professors and they have considerable sway. You never know how valuable a testimonial or an endorsement can be in helping to convince your prospects to sign up with you until you run into a situation where you’re the one without someone else in your corner helping to vouch for and “sell” your product or service. Having two Profs pitching your programs is worth a lot more than piles of pamphlets at the student union or persistent emails and other promotions.
(3) Find A Food Chain (Upward Bound)
More and more, the singly most discouraging words that I hear from the “graduates” of so many of these short-term courses is that – now that they have made the investment, spent the time, and learned whatever, they really don’t know where to go or what to do next – either because the actual training they’ve received is only part of the story (some, but not all, of the skills or tools that they need to really move forward in their job search, etc.) or because there’s no placement support or service from the training provider to help them take the next critical steps.
Now I realize that - as good as your intentions may be - you can’t do everything for people and you can’t push or pull people forward all by yourself. All you can do is to show them a possible future and a defined path to get there. You can tell them everything that is necessary and just what it takes to succeed, but you can’t understand these things for them. Ultimately, it’s on them. But it’s up to you to show them that there is a path for them and that it’s real and manageable if they’re willing to make the effort. It’s simply not enough for you to mentally draw some invisible line and take the position that your responsibility stops there.
I realize that it’s one whole and pretty difficult task to just do a great job at the education part of the process and that most of the people offering these courses aren’t even equipped (and they certainly don’t have the necessary time and/or resources) to run a placement service when – very frankly – they’re constantly scrapping to fill their own next bunch of classes. So – if you can’t do it yourself, it’s critically important to make yourself a place in one or more food chains and become a feeder to the groups and organizations who need the very people that you’re training – even if the training isn’t one hundred percent of their requirements – because they’re not only the logical employers, they’re also willing and able and equipped to fill in the missing gaps with their own on-boarding processes. It’s another win-win situation. You inexpensively source qualified and interested people for them – they fill the bill and finish the process further down the line for you.
PS: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
