Beyond Credits: Finding Hidden Demand in a Commoditized Education Market

If you work in a field like medicine, law, or accounting, the basic unit of continuing education is a commodity. Credits are everywhere. Prices have been pushed down, often to zero. It is very hard to differentiate one provider from another.

The usual response is predictable: more topics, more formats, more discounts.

None of that gets at the real issue, which is demand. Not “How do we get more people to sign up for our Webinars?” but “What are the problems and ambitions that actually matter to them—and where are those problems still poorly served?”

That’s where latent demand lives. And most learning businesses never really look for it.

What follows is a practical way to do that work. While the focus is primarily on markets like continuing medical education (CME), continuing legal education (CLE), and continuing professional education (CPE) where the obvious demand has already been strip-mined, everything here applies to any learning business trying to deal with weak or declining demand for its offerings—you’ll just need to do a modest (and valuable) amount of work to translate examples into your own situation.

Demand Hides in Jobs, Not Topics

When people talk about “what the market wants,” they usually mean topics:

• “Our members want more AI.”
• “People are asking for [flavor of the month] content.”
• “Soft skills are hot right now.”

That’s not demand. That’s noise.

The useful unit of analysis is the job people are trying to get done in their professional lives. Not their job title, but the underlying “I need to…” that’s driving behavior.

For example, a physician might be trying to do the following:

• Stay out of trouble with regulators and malpractice insurers.
• Keep up with changes in guidelines without spending every weekend reading journals.
• Move from a purely clinical role into leadership.

An accountant might be trying do the following:

• Shift their book of business from low-margin compliance work to higher-margin advisory work.
• Use AI to increase throughput without risking confidentiality or running afoul of professional standards.
• Keep clients calm and informed as regulations and reporting expectations shift.

“Get CME credits” or “Get CPE hours” is one job. It’s also the most commoditized job in the entire ecosystem. If your discovery process begins and ends there, you will stay stuck in a low-value race.

The starting point for uncovering hidden demand is simply changing from this question:

• “What topics do you want next year?”

To this question:

• “What are you trying to accomplish in your work that learning could help with—even if you wouldn’t normally call it ‘education’?”

Listen for Anxiety and Workarounds, Not Wish Lists

Once you shift from topics to jobs, the next step is to listen differently.

Most organizations already “listen” in the following ways:

• Periodic topic polling
• Open-ended questions at the end of course evaluations
• Tuning in to the few vocal volunteers who always have opinions

That kind of listening is fine if you want incremental improvements (or, more often, hit-or-miss programs). It rarely surfaces latent demand.

You get much richer insight by asking people to walk you through specific situations:

• “Tell me about the last time you felt behind—on a regulation, a technology, a clinical issue. What did you do?”
• “Walk me through the last time you were scrambling to meet CE requirements. How did that play out?”
• “Think about a time you felt exposed—legally, reputationally, financially—and realized you needed to learn something fast. What happened?”

In those stories, you’re listening for these points

• Jobs
  The recurring “I need to…” patterns that show up across people and settings
• Outcomes
  What “success” looks like in their own terms
• Workarounds
  The cobbled-together solutions they rely on now (YouTube, internal wikis, vendor materials, AI tools, the one colleague who actually reads the regs, etc.)
• Anxieties
  Where people feel genuine risk or opportunity, not just mild curiosity

When you hear a physician say, “I mostly just ask the rep and hope for the best,” or an accountant say, “I copied a template I found online and prayed it would pass muster,” that’s the sound of demand. Not for another one-hour Webinar, but for something that actually reduces risk or increases performance.

You won’t get that from a checkbox survey.

Ask a Few Better Questions at Scale

Qualitative interviews are essential, but at some point you need to move beyond anecdotes. That doesn’t require an elaborate study. It just requires asking better questions of a broader group.

Most continuing education surveys look like this:

• Which of the following topics interest you?
• How likely are you to attend a course on X, Y, Z?

Those questions tell you what people are willing to click on. They do not tell you where demand is strongest.

A more useful approach involves translating what you heard in interviews into outcome statements and then asking people to rate each one on two dimensions: importance and how well it’s being met today.

For example:

• “Minimize the time it takes me to translate new guidelines into what I actually do day-to-day.”
• “Reduce the risk that my use of AI tools will be judged unprofessional or non-compliant.”
• “Increase the share of my work that is higher-margin advisory rather than low-margin compliance.”
• “Reduce the stress and uncertainty I feel when my CE records are audited.”

For each, you ask:

• How important is this to you in your work? (1–10)
• How satisfied are you with how well this is handled today? (1–10)

Where you see “very important” and “poorly handled,” you’re looking at unmet demand.

You’ll almost always find the following:

• Credits themselves are of medium importance and reasonably well served.
• Risk, performance, and transition issues (into leadership, into advisory, into AI-enabled practice) are of high importance and unevenly served at best.

Those are the cracks where a new kind of offer can wedge itself in.

If your next “needs assessment” is just a list of topics with Likert scales, ignore whatever it tells you. It’s not measuring what matters.

Scan the Edges of Your Market

Two groups are especially interesting if you’re hunting for non-obvious demand:

1. People already living in the future
2. People who barely buy from you—or not at all

The first group are the ones who are already experimenting with things everyone else is just talking about:

• The practice that has built its own internal AI guidelines and workflows
• The firm that has aggressively automated basic compliance and now treats CPE as a strategic investment in advisory capabilities
• The professional who is visibly out in front on climate, ESG, or other emerging risk areas

They’ve had to solve problems before the rest of the market even noticed those problems existed.

Ask them:

• “What have you had to figure out that nobody helped you with?”
• “What did you build for your team that others keep asking you about?”
• “Where do you feel pain now that you suspect others will feel in a couple of years?”

The second group—noncustomers and minimal customers—are the people who prove that your current offers aren’t as essential as you’d like to believe:

• Professionals who meet requirements using free or ultra-cheap sources
• Employers who have built their own internal training and send people to you only when they have to
• Younger professionals who engage with online communities, YouTube, and AI tools but never quite get around to joining or buying

Ask them:

• “When you really need to get up to speed on something important, what do you do?”
• “Why don’t you use [your organization] for that? What gets in the way?”
• “Under what conditions, if any, would you gladly pay—or ask your employer to pay—for help?”

Between the lead users and the noncustomers, you’ll see two things:

• Problems that are starting at the edges but will move toward the center
• Problems that are so poorly served by your current offerings that people would rather improvise than buy from you

That’s far more useful than yet another “Our overall satisfaction score is 4.3 out of 5” evaluation report.

Turning Insight into Non-Obvious Offerings

Once you’ve done even a modest version of the above, you’ll have a short list of jobs and outcomes that meet the following criteria:

• Very important
• Poorly served
• Likely to become more painful as larger shifts (e.g., AI, climate, regulation, payment models) play out

The temptation at this point is to go straight back to what you already know: “Great, let’s build a course on that.”

Sometimes that’s fine. More often, you need to stop thinking in terms of individual events and start thinking in terms of solutions.

A few examples to make that more concrete.

1. From Credits to Coverage

If you hear a lot of anxiety about audits, regulatory reviews, and documentation, the job is not “Earn 40 credits.” The job is “Never fail an audit and never be surprised.”

Instead of another Webinar series, you might create an annual “compliance coverage plan” that includes the following:

• Planning and reminders so people aren’t scrambling at the end of a cycle
• Centralized tracking and documentation
• Templates, checklists, and a quick-response help desk
• Audit simulation or review for employers
• CE built in, but as a means to an end, not the main selling point

You’re selling peace of mind and reduced risk. Credits come along for the ride.

2. From Courses to Performance

If you hear firms and employers worrying about margins, throughput, and quality, the job is “Improve the performance of my team,” not “Keep everybody technically up to date.”

Here, you might design the following:

• Role-specific pathways that tie learning to concrete performance metrics (error rates, turnaround times, advisory revenue, patient outcomes)
• Bundled “competency as a service” offers for employers that include learning, assessments, simple dashboards, and reports they can show regulators, boards, or clients

Again, CE is part of the package, but the demand is for improved performance that can be shown to someone who cares.

3. From Content to Credible Transition Support

If you keep hearing about people wanting to move into leadership, into advisory, or into emerging domains like AI and climate, the job is “Make a credible professional transition,” not “Get familiar with the basics.”

Possible responses include selective cohorts or micro-fellowships that offer the following:

• A structured path
• Real projects
• Feedback from respected practitioners
• Some form of signal (credential, endorsement, visible recognition) that actually matters in the market

What people are buying there is identity and status: “I’m one of the people who is leading our AI transition,” not just “I took a course on AI.”

Of course, all of this can still carry CME or CPE. But if you design from the job and the outcome, you stop treating credit hours as the product and start treating them as one feature of something more valuable.

Start Small, But Stop Guessing

None of this requires a massive research budget or a heroic reinvention of your learning business. It does require a different posture.

Concretely, you could do the following over the next 90 days:

1. Run 10 to 15 serious interviews.
   • Talk to a mix of highly engaged users, reluctant users, a couple of employers, and a few people who don’t buy from you.
   • Focus on last-time stories, workarounds, and anxieties.
2. Turn what you hear into a short list of outcomes.
   • Develop 10 to 20 statements about what people are actually trying to achieve or avoid.
   • Ask a broader group to rate importance and how well each is handled today.
3. Pick one promising job and build a very small experiment around it.
   • Create a one-page concept sheet.
   • Call a handful of lead users and employers to pressure-test.
   • Develop a simple landing page or e-mail offer that asks for a real commitment: time, money, or both.

If nobody will commit, you’ve learned something useful relatively cheaply—the demand isn’t there yet, or you haven’t articulated the job in a way that resonates.

If people lean in—especially employers—you’ve just found a pocket of demand that does not depend on winning the race to offer the cheapest credit.

In mature markets, that’s about as close to a competitive advantage as you get.

And, if you’re in a world where CME, CPE, or generic professional development has become a commodity, that shift—from credits to real jobs and outcomes—is probably the only way you’re going to move the needle on reach, revenue, and impact over the long term.

About the Author

Jeff Cobb is a co-founder of Leading Learning and a co-founder and managing director of Tagoras, the company behind Leading Learning. He has nearly three decades of experience working as a consultant, researcher, author, and entrepreneur in the market for adult lifelong learning and has witnessed firsthand how it has evolved over that time period. Jeff is also the founder and host of Learning Revolution, a site that supports entrepreneurial subject matter experts. You can find out more about him on the Tagoras and Learning Revolution Web sites.