By Timothy L. Hill, President, Professional Education, Blackboard

Learning never stops, regardless of when or where we earned those coveted college and university degrees. We continue to learn throughout our lives, and continuing professional education has become critical to foster new life skills and develop our careers.

The positive impact of the learning solutions offered by Blackboard goes far beyond the higher education and K-12 education markets. In fact, the Blackboard Professional Education (ProEd) group was formed specifically to focus on this continuum of “K-to-Gray” learning.

You and your organization are among the nearly 200 ProEd clients that use Blackboard^® software and services every day to make your business more efficient and effective, and add greater value to the professional and personal experiences of your employees, members and constituents.

The use of e-Learning has become a requirement for modern organizations to remain successful in the corporate, government, healthcare, member association, non-profit and for-profit education sectors. The futurist Alvin Toffler wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read and write. They will be those who can’t learn, unlearn and relearn.” Whether you are training office professionals or skilled factory workers, war fighters or generals, volunteers or citizens, K-to-Gray learning is changing the way we all approach business.

As the importance of lifelong professional learning increases during the Information Age, and organizations view training as a good investment, the demographics behind the changes caused by K-to-Gray learning present all of us with both challenges and opportunities:

• Nearly 78 million Baby Boomers will be approaching retirement age during the next 10 to 15 years, and their choice to remain in or leave the job market will impact all of us greatly.
• There will be a shortage of skilled and professional workers to fill jobs vacated by Baby Boomers, and even the federal government is gravely concerned about how they will fill open positions.
• Researchers estimate people change careers every 10 years, on average; and according to the U.S. Department of Labor “approximately 40% of the workforce changes jobs every year.”
• An increasing number of employers (85% of Fortune 500 companies) are paying for their employees to return to school.
• Eighty percent of older workers replying to a survey conducted by the AARP indicated they want opportunities to learn new skills.

At Blackboard ProEd, we firmly believe the dramatic realities of these demographic changes equal tremendous opportunities for your organization to gain new clients, create new revenue streams, and better leverage your training program to add greater value to your constituents’ experiences. And we can help you take advantage of these opportunities.

Leverage Blackboard products and services to create and sell to new markets, lower your training costs, improve the productivity of your workforce, add value to your own products and services, or increase your organization’s membership. We can help you obtain the best ROI from your Blackboard software and services.

Chances are many of your own constituents and customers have already used Blackboard software in high school, as an undergraduate student or in graduate school. Employees and constituents of all ages find Blackboard software easy to use, and invaluable to improving their skills sets, knowledge and value in the marketplace.

Learn more by reviewing the success stories of organizations like yours who fully leverage Blackboard ProEd solutions to capitalize on the continuum of K-to-Gray learning. Download one of our case studies today.

If you’d like to share your success story in a case study or as a reference, please e-mail Todd Nelson, director of ProEd Marketing and Business Development, at todd.nelson@blackboard.com.

[Statistical information presented in this article appears in “Lifelong Learning Trends: A Profile of Continuing Higher Education” (9th Edition). Copyright 2006 by the University Continuing Education Association.]