By Adam Kelly-Moore

The traditional model of executive education was built around a relatively simple premise, identify a set of skills that senior-level professionals need, package them into a short-form programme and bring professionals keen to add another layer of qualification to their CV into the classroom to learn them. 

That model is becoming harder to sustain. Not because it is falling out of relevance – more that it is becoming even more vital in a rapidly shifting world. 

Artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs and organisations at pace and workforce expectations are changing. Demographic shifts are creating new challenges for employers, with businesses having to navigate geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption and increasingly complex questions around leadership and organisational culture. 

In that environment, there is no single list of skills that every executive needs to acquire and no single point at which learning can be considered complete. 

To that end, Executive Education is no longer a “nice to have” aspect of professional life. Increasingly, professionals are finding that standard business qualifications such as the MBA, no matter their robustness, need to be topped up with additional and lifelong learning.  

The most interesting development in executive education, therefore, is that business schools are rethinking what executive education is for; moving away from limited, prescriptive programmes and towards learning that swiftly responds to a more diverse set of needs for businesses, sectors, regions and individuals.

The need for business education beyond an MBA 

The developments made at Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow provides a valuable example of this shift. 

Its new Executive Education portfolio has been developed through direct engagement with employers across its network, with organisations helping to identify the leadership, workforce and organisational challenges they are facing. The resulting suite of programmes ranges from AI for Productivity and Growth to Adaptive Leadership: EQ and Neuro-inclusivity and Menopause Ready: Lead. Protect. Perform. 

The breadth is significant and rather than defining executive development around a fixed conception of what a modern leader should know, the portfolio reflects the very different problems its local stakeholders and organisations are trying to solve now. 

It also reflects a more inclusive idea of who executive education is for. Adam Smith has introduced tiered pricing, with fees starting at £295 for charities, NGOs and non-profit organisations, £395 for SMEs and University of Glasgow alumni, and £495 for corporate organisations. The intention is to make access to executive development less dependent on organisational size or budget. 

That matters because the challenges of adapting to change are not confined to large multinational companies. Smaller businesses, charities, public-sector organisations and other employers face many of the same pressures, often with fewer resources available to address them. 

This widening of access to Executive Education has been seen at other UK-based business schools in recent year, with institutions such as Imperial Business School and Durham University Business School both utilising schemes such as the UK Government’s Apprenticeship Levy to provide financial support for participants who otherwise would have been held back from learning due to costs. 

Adam Smith’s approach extends beyond open-enrolment programmes, through Tailored Executive Development, organisations can work directly with academic experts to co-create learning around specific business challenges and strategic priorities.  

This is arguably where the future of executive education lies, not simply in offering more courses, but in building a closer relationship between what business schools know and what organisations actually need and acting swiftly to provide it. 

Expertise beyond academia 

This shift is also changing the way business schools work with organisations.  

Increasingly, executive education is being shaped through partnerships in which businesses and academic teams work together to identify specific challenges and develop learning around them. That might mean bringing together faculty expertise with a company’s own knowledge, adapting programmes to the needs of a particular sector, or developing new approaches around an emerging issue. The result is a more collaborative model of executive education, with organisations helping to shape the learning they need and business schools bringing research, expertise and fresh perspectives to the table. 

Whilst such arrangements are typically confined to custom-built programmes for individual organisations, some learnings are being extended beyond this to wider learners. 

That changes the role of the business school, making it becomes less a provider of predetermined knowledge and more an intermediary between academic research and live organisational challenges. 

SDA Bocconi’s approach illustrates how far this thinking can go. Its 2026-2030 strategy describes executive education as moving beyond individual courses towards a continuous learning ecosystem, with an emphasis on maintaining relationships with professionals throughout their careers. It is also looking to serve a wider range of organisations, from major corporations and financial institutions to SMEs and public institutions. 

The underlying logic is straightforward, if the world of work keeps changing, executive education cannot remain static. 

This is also why research remains important, as the value of a business school lies in its ability to draw on the work its academics are doing to explore the issues organisations are beginning to encounter, allowing executive education to connect emerging evidence with practical application and ensure that learning remains relevant to the challenges businesses face. 

For SDA Bocconi, that relationship between research and business is central to its model. For Adam Smith, programmes are similarly delivered by academics whose research can be translated into practical tools and frameworks for organisations. 

Elsewhere, business schools are also reconsidering the boundaries between executive education, professional development and lifelong learning. 

Navigating the port-folio career 

Imperial College London’s new Lifelong Learning initiative brings together professional and executive programmes, bespoke industry education and other forms of learning under a broader lifelong-learning model. Its executive and professional education offer connects university research across disciplines with practical learning, while giving professionals the flexibility to study on campus, online or through hybrid formats. 

This reflects a changing understanding of how careers work. The idea that education happens at the beginning of a career, followed by a period of applying what was learned, is increasingly difficult to reconcile with a labour market in which technology, roles and organisational expectations can change repeatedly throughout a professional lifetime. 

Executive education therefore has to become more continuous, more adaptable and more closely connected to the environments in which people actually work. This creates a two-way opportunity for Business Schools. 

Organisations need access to expertise that can help them respond to new challenges. Business schools, meanwhile, need organisations to understand which questions are emerging outside the classroom. Closer relationships with industry can help inform research, teaching and future programmes, creating a cycle in which business problems influence academic exploration and academic insight feeds back into business. 

That is the thinking behind Adam Smith Business School’s wider partnership model, which brings together three forms of engagement: Experience, connecting organisations with student talent; Executive, supporting workforce development through executive education and organisational learning; and Exchange, linking businesses with research, consultancy and knowledge-transfer activity. 

Executive education is therefore becoming less of a standalone product and more of a thread connecting business schools to the organisations and communities around them. 

Education must continue to evolve 

The implication is that there may no longer be a single “correct” model of executive education. A business school in Glasgow may need to respond to different challenges from one operating in Milan, London or another global business centre. A multinational company may need something very different from an SME or charity. And the needs of the same organisation may change significantly from one year to the next. 

The strongest business schools will be those capable of recognising that and future of executive education is unlikely to be defined by how many programmes a school can put on its prospectus. It will be defined by how effectively it can listen, adapt and translate expertise into something that makes a tangible difference. 

As business needs continue to evolve, business schools must help executives identify the skills and knowledge they need to meet new challenges and prepare for what lies ahead. 

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