Continuing executive education … one more time

Question: My brother and I organized a learning event organization several years after we retired from the school where we taught for about 20 years.  I was the eldest and I retired ahead at 65 years old.  My brother retired a year later.

We combined our retirement money and invested in a convenience store franchise.  Business was hard but money was very good the first two years until the first quarter of the third year because of the Skyway extension.

We knew we had to take our money and what’s left of it to another business.

I was a marketing professor and my brother was in finance.  My marketing sense wanted to wait things out until construction was over.  My brother showed me that it did not make business sense to do this.

According to my brother, we should think of another business where the initial capital requirement was minimal but the revenue flow was quick and substantial.  We both arrived at the idea of joining the learning event industry or the continuing executive education business.  We did.

Our first three years were terrific in terms of cash flow and profit.  Then recession hit the economy accompanied by the entry of a lot of competition.  At about this time, we read your column talking about the learning event industry consolidation and its eventual return to the business schools.

So please tell us: “Is this the beginning of the end for our industry?”

Answer:   Before we talk about options, we should first talk about what took place between the time I came out with that Marketing Rx column on continuing executive education (about Feb. 2014) and Jan. 2015.

When I refer to what took place, I’m still into the subject of continuing executive education.

What happens over a period as short as 12 months can define or redefine options as well as direction.

By May 2014, I became heavily involved with Bayan Academy on a full time basis.  More than five years before that, I was just one of Bayan’s regular speakers and mentors.  I taught DIY (Do-It-Yourself) marketing research and social marketing to Bayan’s targeted audiences.  These audiences were what it referred to as the “entrepreneurial poor who are in microenterprises at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Bayan Academy, whose full corporate name is Bayan Academy for Social Entrepreneurship and Human Resource Development, is a non-stock, non-profit social development organization offering entrepreneurship, management and educational training programs and services including livelihood and skills training courses to micro- and small enterprises.

As students, I found that micro-entrepreneurs were a more demanding group.  They expressed their demands in a quiet but persistent way.  They ask a “clarifying” question that is almost always preceded by “this-may-be-a-dumb-question-to-ask” qualifier.  I quickly give the clarification answer.  A few minutes later, it was obvious that my answer wasn’t at all clear because they follow-up with the same question but repeated in a “what-if-this-happens-in …” this or that specific case.

As this episode repeated itself from one class to another, I found I needed to review and revise and indeed to even overhaul my teaching methodology as well as my learning materials.  I had to tailor fit both my teaching style and materials to the students’ specific need.

The workshop at the end of a course was the true means for them to gain understanding.

The lectures and the case studies that came before did not yield understanding.  The lectures impressed them but they quickly forgot their lessons.  The case studies stayed in their memory cells and they remembered but understanding did not happen.  It was the workshop that gave the understanding because there was application of lessons heard and remembered.

So I learned to anchor my teaching and my learning materials on actual application and student use.  Anchoring them on the approved and tried curriculum and accumulated materials and cases as I and my fellow marketing educators had been doing only impressed and got them to remember.  There was little or no understanding.  But it is understanding that is the true purpose of teaching and the true end of learning.

There are fundamental implications of these insights.  For one, they tell us that we must change our low regard for vocational training and for the subject at hand, for short term, non-degree executive education.  That most of us have this low regard is our own fault.

When my former AIM, Ateneo and LaSalle colleagues learned I was full-time at Bayan, many were unbelieving and said: “You mean you’re now just a trainer and no longer a professor?  You’re now into vocational training and no longer in knowledge training?”

It’s now clear to me that all along it was the other way around.  True teaching and meaningful learning were with the vocational and the continuing executive education teachers and students because teaching was for application and learning was for usage.  No wonder most of my MBA students were bored, for example, with their probability theory based quantitative analysis subject but fully engaged by my applied marketing research elective.  You ask if what’s going on signals the beginning of the end for your learning event and continuing education industry.  From the foregoing it should be clear that the opposite is true.  This is not to say that it’s the degree program that’s at risk of fading out.  Degree programs will be around but as I’ve argued in my previous columns, its priority will eventually fall below the continuing executive education programs.  The signs of that priority reversal are already with us.

Witness, for example, how the MBA duration continues to shorten from two years to 18 months to a year to 10 months.  The rise of more and more corporate universities and colleges is another eye-opening sign.  The time is now for you to prepare and organize for this change.  Putting it off and remaining in denial will be damaging to the point of irreversibility. Keep your questions coming.  Send them to me at [email protected].