Great piece as always Alberto! I wonder if an even more radical notion may come in to play. What I'm seeing at places like Maven is that cohort based courses give you the network and academic component of a business school, micro-targeted at your need, and delivered by high-influence folks you know (authors, twitter gods, etc) It feels like we may see a disaggregation of business school, followed by a re-aggregation at the employer level. That re-aggregation feels like a stretch for a Guild or degreed, so may be another great market opening.
So we'll see in a few years. MBAs are running at a much higher scale – there are roughly 200,000 MBA graduates every year (Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/ch_3.asp), so hard to know what CBCs will look like at those numbers
Thanks John! Great thoughts. I think CBCs today are very targeted to the learners' needs, but that may change as they scale. I'm more bullish on "business bootcamps" like Stoa (~6 months of training) to take on the MBA as a category than short-term creator courses. The main reason to enroll in an MBA is to find a better job, and MBAs are actually not that bad at that if you can afford one!
So, business bootcamps I think are a much more real threat to MBAs, whereas creator courses are generating new demand from new market participants.
Interesting, I agree the main reason to enroll in an MBA is to find a better job but this comes through (a) signal-value of getting into a top school (benefit of doing an MBA dramatically decreases if you're not going to Stanford, INSEAD, Harvard etc) and (b) the network you get access to.
The quality of the education is a distant third in that value chain. A strong CBC business bootcamp will be able to take some of the market away at (b).
John, could you say more about what a re-aggregation might look like? Is it being known for a private company stamp (for lack of a better word) like OnDeck or something like you'll be known more for where you worked than where you went to school (if you went to school)?
I see some of this with big 3 consulting firms and i-bankers, where you know there is a baseline skillset to work with. I'm also seeing some of that from APM programs from FB, Airbnb, and Google (though Google's may have fallen off a little)
well mainly i think that enterprise sales are a big deal as guild proved and they are very different than the product focus that many CBCs and others will take to build things people love. so it may be that it evolves the way the MOOCs did with eventually each company building an enterprise team. But there could also be a world in which selling to enterprise and building the reporting and tracking tools to help justify the spend on these things for employee retention is a separate business than building courses.
Ahh I see, different wavelengths! Your rationale makes a lot of sense and, I imagine, increases the addressable market considerably if CBCs are easily eligible for expensing. Gagan also has a framework/experience to look at here via how Udemy approached enterprise sales.
Great piece as always Alberto! I wonder if an even more radical notion may come in to play. What I'm seeing at places like Maven is that cohort based courses give you the network and academic component of a business school, micro-targeted at your need, and delivered by high-influence folks you know (authors, twitter gods, etc) It feels like we may see a disaggregation of business school, followed by a re-aggregation at the employer level. That re-aggregation feels like a stretch for a Guild or degreed, so may be another great market opening.
So we'll see in a few years. MBAs are running at a much higher scale – there are roughly 200,000 MBA graduates every year (Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/ch_3.asp), so hard to know what CBCs will look like at those numbers
Thanks John! Great thoughts. I think CBCs today are very targeted to the learners' needs, but that may change as they scale. I'm more bullish on "business bootcamps" like Stoa (~6 months of training) to take on the MBA as a category than short-term creator courses. The main reason to enroll in an MBA is to find a better job, and MBAs are actually not that bad at that if you can afford one!
So, business bootcamps I think are a much more real threat to MBAs, whereas creator courses are generating new demand from new market participants.
Interesting, I agree the main reason to enroll in an MBA is to find a better job but this comes through (a) signal-value of getting into a top school (benefit of doing an MBA dramatically decreases if you're not going to Stanford, INSEAD, Harvard etc) and (b) the network you get access to.
The quality of the education is a distant third in that value chain. A strong CBC business bootcamp will be able to take some of the market away at (b).
John, could you say more about what a re-aggregation might look like? Is it being known for a private company stamp (for lack of a better word) like OnDeck or something like you'll be known more for where you worked than where you went to school (if you went to school)?
I see some of this with big 3 consulting firms and i-bankers, where you know there is a baseline skillset to work with. I'm also seeing some of that from APM programs from FB, Airbnb, and Google (though Google's may have fallen off a little)
well mainly i think that enterprise sales are a big deal as guild proved and they are very different than the product focus that many CBCs and others will take to build things people love. so it may be that it evolves the way the MOOCs did with eventually each company building an enterprise team. But there could also be a world in which selling to enterprise and building the reporting and tracking tools to help justify the spend on these things for employee retention is a separate business than building courses.
Ahh I see, different wavelengths! Your rationale makes a lot of sense and, I imagine, increases the addressable market considerably if CBCs are easily eligible for expensing. Gagan also has a framework/experience to look at here via how Udemy approached enterprise sales.