Workforce-aligned education is more in demand than ever, yet many professional continuing education (PCE) programs are struggling to capture their share. According to the State of Continuing Education 2024 report, enrollments in online and PCE programs have dropped to their lowest levels in recent years, even as institutions expand offerings to new audiences like healthcare, government, and alumni learners.
So where’s the disconnect?
The value of continuing education is clear, both for learners and institutions. But building a great program isn’t enough. To grow, PCE programs need strategic marketing that speaks to diverse learners, navigates internal complexity, and proves clear value.
Why Continuing Education Matters to Institutions
Continuing education and workforce development aren’t just good for learners—they’re critical to institutional sustainability and impact. Here’s how:
- Enrollment Gap: Adult learners help offset undergrad declines due to demographic shifts and can act as on- and off-ramps for degree programs.
- Relevance Gap: Rapid tech and industry changes demand fresh, responsive content for reskilling and upskilling.
- Partnership Gap: Collaboration with employers boosts job placement, builds a skilled employee funnel, and ensures content is aligned with industry needs
- Resource Gap: Many CE programs build on capacity from existing faculty and curricula, making them cost-effective and scalable.
- Accessibility Gap: Modular, flexible programs reach new learner segments due to greater affordability and convenience.
In short, continuing education delivers value across the board. But institutions still face a critical question: How do we market these programs effectively?
What Holds PCE Marketing Back?
Through our work with institutions nationwide, we’ve seen several common challenges that limit program growth:
Fragmented Audiences
CE learners include career-switchers, upskillers, and lifelong learners—each with different goals. Messaging must be targeted, not one-size-fits-all.
Siloed Resources
When CE is decentralized, marketing efforts become inconsistent or duplicated. Tapping into shared resources and aligning messaging is key.
Limited Personalization
Today’s learners expect personalized communications, but privacy constraints and lean staffing can make this difficult to deliver at scale.
Adult Learner Visibility
Most institutional marketing still centers on traditional students. Adult learners often don’t see themselves reflected in the messaging.
Unclear ROI
Learners are pragmatic. They want to know what skills they’ll gain, what outcomes to expect, and how quickly it pays off. Institutions must strike the right balance: communicate impact without overpromising.
Local Relevance
While global skills matter, so do regional needs. PCE programs that reflect local labor trends can be especially powerful, but only when institutions have the systems in place to surface, market, and enroll learners efficiently.
Even when these barriers are diagnosed, many of them stem from a deeper structural issue: the infrastructure supporting non-degree learning wasn’t built for speed, integration, or modern learner expectations.
The Hidden Constraint: Fragmented Infrastructure
Many of the enrollment barriers facing continuing education and non-degree programs are often treated as marketing or staffing challenges. In reality, they are infrastructure challenges.
At many institutions, lifelong learning lives in systems and processes that were never designed for speed or scale. Some programs sit inside continuing education units with tools separate from the rest of the institution. Others are routed through traditional academic workflows built for semester-based degrees. Both approaches introduce friction that looks like duplicated systems, slow governance, limited visibility, and disconnected learner experiences.
This fragmentation shows up downstream as familiar problems: slow follow-up, inconsistent communication, unclear pricing, and enrollment experiences that feel harder than they should. The issue is not lack of demand or program quality. It’s that non-degree learning is often forced to operate on infrastructure that can’t support modern learner expectations.
Institutions making progress in lifelong learning are addressing this foundation first. They are managing non-degree offerings through connected platforms that function more like modern commerce experiences (e.g., supporting discovery, engagement, enrollment, and ongoing communication) while still integrating with core academic and operational systems. When infrastructure is aligned, marketing and enrollment efforts can finally move at the pace lifelong learners expect.
What’s Working: Five Takeaways for Smarter CE Marketing
Drawing from Noodle’s partnerships across a wide range of institutions, we see five consistent strategies that help continuing education programs gain traction:
1. Invest in Data Infrastructure to Get a Holistic Picture
Use tools that provide real-time insights into engagement, conversion, and learner behavior. Investing in a data lake that sources information across the student journey enables agile, evidence-based marketing and a clear understanding of where to invest marketing dollars to drive enrollment.
2. Modernize Your Marketing Stack to Enable Personalization
SEO, lifecycle email campaigns, and A/B testing aren’t just for traditional programs. They’re essential for building awareness and driving sustained interest. Leverage AI to supercharge your outreach – offering personalized marketing messages, adapting to real-time interactions, or improving targeting.
3. Be Proactive with Predictive Analytics
AI and analytics can personalize outreach, flag at-risk learners, and help forecast program demand—especially important for modular, just-in-time offerings. Deeply understanding someone’s learning journey allows you to be proactive in outreach – send nudges to promote course completion or reminders to update credentials with your latest offering.
4. Expand Industry and Alumni Partnerships
Collaborate with local employers, industry associations, and alumni to amplify reach, enhance relevance, and co-design programming. Modular development of course content can help institutions develop more customized or co-branded offerings, with moderate incremental effort.
5. Understand the Lifetime Value of a Learner
Beyond enrollment numbers, measure learner satisfaction, career advancement, and repeat engagement to build lasting credibility and improvement. By evolving with the learner, institutions can become a trusted destination for learning throughout a student’s learning journey.
Continuing education is a critical lever for institutions seeking growth, relevance, and impact. But growth requires more than building the right programs. It takes marketing strategies that connect with learners where they are, speak to what they value, and evolve alongside the marketplace.
Let’s Noodle on Continuing Education Together
Engaging with a reliable, experienced partner like Noodle can help institutions scale continuing education efficiently. With Noodle Learning Platform (NLP), degree and non-degree offerings can be connected through a single, flexible infrastructure, unlocking scale, personalized learner experiences, and streamlined operations.
The platform is LMS-agnostic and supports financial processes, including checkout, invoices, refunds, and discount codes. NLP also enables affiliate channels to promote content to new industries and geographies, expanding reach while keeping operations simple.
Let’s Talk.
