The Decision to Learn: Why People Seek Continuing Education and How Membership Organizations Can Meet Learners' Needs

Engagement creates loyalty, and one of the best ways to build engagement with members and customers is to provide professional educational opportunities that they perceive as valuable. Identifying the learning activities and preferences of association members is the key to delivering educational programs that will resonate and help build that critical engagement. The research in The Decision to Learn part of the ASAE Decision to benchmarking series sets out to do just that. More than 7,000 professionals responded to a survey, providing valuable data on attendance, provider and format preferences, motivations, barriers, presenter preferences, investment, and feelings of affiliation with the organization that provides the education.

A few highlights of the research include these findings:

Association members consider access to professional education one of the most important benefits of membership.

Association learners strongly prefer in-person programs, but will attend distance learning if necessary.

Sense of affiliation with an association is the strongest predictor for participation in learning programs.

Learners want to learn from practitioners.

In addition, The Decision to Learn provides the information learning providers need to offer professional education opportunities that will appeal to their audiences, including how to draw in people seeking certification, how to structure and deliver educational offerings, what matters to different demographic segments in particular younger generations and how to accommodate for perceived barriers among learners.

Lillie R. Albert, PhD, is an associate professor at Boston College Lynch School of Education, who focuses on the influence of sociocultural historic contexts have on adult learning. She has published her research in leading national and international journals in her field and has presented at major research conferences.

Monica Dignam, vice president of industry and market research at the ASAE and The Center for Association Leadership, has been a professional researcher for more than 30 years. Before coming to the ASAE, she was president of Monalco, Inc., a Milwaukee firm specializing in research for associations. She has also been an active volunteer for the ASAE and a member of several research and other associations.

ASAE is a membership organization of more than 22,000 association executives and industry partners representing more than 11,000 organizations. ASAE members manage leading trade associations, individual membership societies and voluntary organizations across the United States and in nearly 50 countries around the world. ASAE is the preeminent source of knowledge, learning, community, and advocacy for the field of association management. ASAE s publishing imprint, Association Management Press, reflects the ASAE mission by publishing relevant, reliable content focusing on helping professionals tackle their organizational leadership and management challenges.