“Education has a retention problem.”
Or at least, that’s what we’ve been told. But we see evidence that a new market is emerging.
The World Economic Forum expects 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. LinkedIn puts it even higher, estimating that 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change by 2030, with AI as the primary catalyst. Someone can stay in the same job, at exactly the same company, and still find that the skills their job requires are changing significantly around them.
This creates a fast growing market of learners that are constantly underestimated: people who never really finish learning.
We see them all the time at NextWork. Roy is one of the clearest examples - he entered tech through a support desk role and, around twenty jobs later, he is now a Tech Architecture Manager with 16 years of experience.
By almost any traditional measure, Roy has made it - the career, the seniority and the experience that education is meant to deliver. Yet in less than a year with NextWork, he’s completed more than 200 projects, and he now runs a weekly group where other learners build alongside him.
Roy isn’t learning to finally become technical. He’s learning because staying technical is continuous work.
AI makes this behaviour far more common. The obvious reason is that AI is changing jobs, but the more interesting one is that it’s expanding what an individual person can do. A designer can now build functional software. A marketer can automate workflows that once required engineers. An engineer can prototype a product that once required a team. Anyone with an idea can travel much further towards execution before needing permission, capital, or more people.
Each time the boundary of what a person can do expands, new capabilities create new ambitions - and new ambitions create new reasons to learn.
The largest education companies of the next generation won’t be built around helping someone reach one fixed destination. They will be built around someone whose destination keeps moving: a person who learns, applies what they learned, leaves when they no longer need help, and returns when the next problem or opportunity appears.
That is the learner we increasingly see at NextWork. It’s not an “ideal” and it’s not some marginal super-user group. It’s the majority of the world’s population. Someone for whom learning is not a stage of life, but permanent infrastructure for how they work, build and adapt. This is the new market.
All my best,
