The Future of Lifelong Learning for Adults

According to PEW, 73% of adults consider themselves lifelong learners, a percentage which goes even higher to 81% in 18–29 year olds.

Lifelong learning is a weighty but also nebulous concept in adult education. It generally alludes to the need for people to learn and unlearn skills and mindsets for the rest of their lives. In adult learning, the concept is driven by the necessity for professionals to reskill considering the reality of skills being half as valuable every 5 yrs. More broadly, it can also speak to the aspiration of adults to live more fulfilled lives.

Investing in adult lifelong learning is a timely discussion. We are living longer, with life expectancy more than doubling between 1800 and 2017, and we consequently have longer careers. We’re witnessing people aged 75+ yrs projected to grow the fastest of any demographic in the US. Tech has exponentially open new types of work and remote work arrangements, while democratizing how adults earn, learn, build and organize. Investing in lifelong learning is also timely considering how the 47 million Americans who voluntarily resigned in 2021, has re-awakened a mainstream focus on doing purposeful work. It’s an exciting intersection of tailwinds!

Lifelong learning is estimated to be a $500+ billion market and has historically projected to grow rapidly at 8%. Even from that lens, 78% of business leaders say that there is an unmet need for continuous, lifelong learning due to the pace and scope of innovation. I believe that the adult learning market, of which corporate training in North America alone makes up $150B, is large and underestimated.

Because of the economics and urgency of workplace based learning, lifelong learning has largely been defined by what companies want from its talent. The human side of that equation matters too as we optimize for human, not just companies needs.

Below, I propose a shared vision, language and opportunity scope for investors and entrepreneurs with the hope that we can build on this to further develop the ecosystem around adults to live more fulfilled lives.

A Framework for Lifelong Learning

Here is a working holistic framework of how we think about lifelong learning for adults at all stages, adapted from a version of a career navigation framework shared by Entangled Solutions (now Guild Education).

Note: I excluded leisure in this categorization of lifelong learning to demarcate a boundary with the emerging edutainment landscape which deserves it’s own framework.

Across these categories, there are 3 exciting and emerging opportunities which if harnessed can take us to the next level of enabling adults, like you and I, to live more fulfilling lives and careers.

Scaffolding to Navigate Transitions

The average adult in our lifetimes will transition careers at least 6 times.

While the coaching industry has boomed at ~7% growth to a 20B industry with industry leaders such as BetterUp providing holistic coaching and mental health support. The growth of coaching has provided access to personalized support through a stage in their journey, users could navigate transitions even better if there was an integrated support ecosystem around their transitions. New entrants have leveraged peer coaching as a way to reduce the cost of expert coaching as traditionally delivered 1–1, and integrated access to networks and opportunities to improve success in these transitions. Exciting examples of this include Mission Collaborative, Modern Elder Academy, and The Grand.

The next frontier will be a more integrated solution to a coaching experience where you can get exposure to new career pathways, support planning your finances around a transition, and access the social capital to unlock opportunities; eight out of 10 jobs are after all never publicly advertised.

The Rise of Guides

We have been viewing the employee engagement problem largely constrained to the end of the funnel. Followers of workforce development trends will be familiar with the Gallup statistic that a staggering 67% of employees feel disengaged in their jobs. The roots of the issue start to become visible when we contextualize this with the reality that disengagement amongst fifth graders is at 26%, 55% for eighth graders and 66% for high school seniors.

Addressing the root of disengagement includes helping people find the right fit opportunities for their strengths and preferences, even before directing them to engaging experiences. In fact, job match quality is a critical predictor of an individual’s psychological, social and economic well-being as well as firm productivity and profitability.

There is an emergence of career guides for tech talent to find the right-fit opportunities like Free Agency, a solution that can extend into other talent categories in future. The dynamics that have made the rise of guides begin with tech talent include a high global demand for tech talent, large variances of base and equity compensation models, and a poor talent recruiting experience.

There are two emerging guide models — open loop guide models like Free Agency, SkillUp and Career Explorer* which connect talent to opportunities in and beyond their networks, and closed loop models like Career Karma and Guild leverage which guide users within their marketplace of options for learning and opportunity.

There is opportunity for guides to help us navigate the Exposure and Discovery categories so we can then make more informed upskilling decisions, find right fit opportunities and navigate the ups and downs of the journey to success.

Guides such as Talented by JobTech and UTS help talent discover new careers through AI based recommendations by mapping out potential pathways based on a large database of jobs overlaid with insights on preferences and skills. I’m excited for new models that look beyond the jobs and pathways that exist today to also capture the new jobs being created that have non-traditional entry pathways. Eventually I hope we can democratize access to opportunity by capturing and integrating our meta skills into recommendation engines, and eventually replace the standard legacy proxies used to determine talent-opportunity fit.

Explosion of Career Pathways, Portfolio Careers & Identity Infrastructure

There are increasingly more options of how we can find fulfillment, find financial stability, and design our careers. We are also starting to look beyond our full time jobs as the single source of professional fulfillment and income, to a portfolio approach.

In his recent a16z feature, Ben Stokes speaks about how low code is enabling more tinkering in the developer community, but I find the trend is broader precisely because of the proliferation of no code tools, creator friendly payment solutions, and a diversity of platforms including websites like ProductHunt which allow you to get an idea on Monday and launch it to thousands of people by Friday.

Ben cites examples like 12 startups in 12 months, by Pieter Levels, whose portfolio of projects generate $3 million per year, and Daniel Vasallo’s online community of 800 paying members through which he teaches people how to create a portfolio of small bets. “Sometimes I joke on Twitter and say my only business plan is to avoid having to go back to a 9-to-5 job,” Daniel is quoted as telling his latest cohort; a sentiment that is resonating more explicitly these days.

I’ve come across many professionals simultaneously working two FTE jobs which is becoming more visible with communities like OverEmployed which shares best practice on handling two FTE jobs simultaneously; it includes stories of people waking up early to start their east coast job, and then switch gears in the early afternoon to start their west coast job, and lessons on how to update your LinkedIn, and taxes accordingly.

In a career portfolio approach, we carry a multiplicity of identities ranging from being full time staff, tinkerers, gig workers and angel investors. This creates an opportunity to help us showcase our multifaceted identities as Polyworks (a16z backed) and Read.CV are exploring, and help us find relevant communities as our identities shift.

Of the 30% of workers who will change jobs this year, more than 60% of them are changing industries. This opens doors for impact including how to effectively onboard professionals into new contexts, and help us translate our experiences and credibility to a new role, such as moving from an operator to an angel investor.

In the past 5 years, there’s been an explosion of virtual and IRL demographic-specific peer learning and peer support communities that support transitions into new roles, industries, and or higher levels of excellence. Some notable examples include COOhort and Operators Guild for startup operations leaders, Chief for female execs, and TopKnot for women tech professionals, and Valence for black professionals.

Professionals are also pursuing their dreams through entrepreneurship by buying and selling SMEs through platforms like MicroAcquire, providing fractional services through platforms like Continuum, becoming angel investors through platforms like AngeList, and starting new companies from scratch.

There are extreme and nuanced challenges in underrepresented demographics requiring more relevant transition support, as this verbatim excerpt from Angel List reminds us.

Black professionals, in particular, are turning to entrepreneurship at unprecedented rates with a 30% increase in Black-owned businesses in the U.S. from before the pandemic. Black women are at the forefront of the entrepreneurship boom, creating 1.4M jobs for Americans. Yet, funding is still disproportionate for Black entrepreneurs, with 37% feeling like they need someone white on their executive team in order to receive the proper funding.

There are huge opportunities for demographic specific enablers across demographics (gender, race, working parents etc), to unlock more builders and with targeted support for them to succeed as first time entrepreneurs and professionals transitioning in industries.

I’m particularly excited about the opportunity for web3 businesses such as DAOs to add utility in how we organize to deliver work, how we get paid through a variety of currencies and mediums as we take on increasing more fractional work models, and businesses that enrich HR tech to manage contracts, taxes and other administrative aspects of people and project collaboration. There’s also emerging opportunity in how we leverage our capital to invest in others — Trendex for example allows us to invest in a diversity of creative and professional talent we want to enable to live out their fullest potential.

Rise of Niche Flywheels

We see pioneers of vertical-specific career navigation platforms, which Jeff Jordan presciently alluded to in his post about the rise of vertical labor marketplaces which was mostly focused on recruiting.

On Deck (NFX backed) helps talent transition into high growth startups in tech providing them learning, community, social capital, networking, job and funding opportunities.

Incredible Health (a16z backed) helps nurses in their careers by offering coaching, learning, salary estimators and job opportunities.

By building a flywheel which consolidates high quality talent, community, opportunities and where relevant, investment capital, I expect these specialized organizations will accelerate individuals ability to drive innovation and chart new career pathways.

In all these cases, there is a core business model around which additional support is built to enable higher likelihood of success.

These are early days of seeing the power of a comprehensive and powerful ecosystem built to support specialized adult transitions.

Shaping the Future of Lifelong Learning

Shared language is a powerful foundation for meaning in a community to identify gaps and opportunities for collaboration.

You’re invited to contribute to these insights and refine this thinking for the ecosystem of investors and builders.

I hope to see more builders and thesis-driven investors identify the gaps in lifelong learning, identify new business models and levers to build products that help all of us live more fulfilling lives.

*Although they do it for a university demographic, the overarching principles of Career Explorer’s model is what we’re highlighting as an example of an integrated guide