When we think about continued education for adult learners, the conversation is often centered around people who want to make a career change or who want to climb up a corporate ladder and need new skills to do so.

The fast-moving advancements in tech (and the resulting shifting labor needs) is changing that, however. Now, many workers aren’t just benefiting from additional education to pursue new roles or promotions— it’s helping them learn new skills to grow with in-demand tech and excel in their current roles.

Zachery Gries is an outstanding example of this. Zachery used EdAssist’s continued education program to complete both an AFCPE certification and multiple online courses to help him grow alongside evolving technology and excel professionally.

Zachery’s experience with EdAssist’s education benefits 

Zachery works as a director on the education finance team at EdAssist, and has worked with Bright Horizons since 2019. He helps support EdAssist learners to maximize their tuition aid and reimbursement benefits, leverage federal and educational loans, and create plans to better optimize what they’re spending on continued education.

In 2023, a supervisor had asked if he was interested in pursuing an AFCPE® certification, which is a highly respected financial counseling and coaching certification. This certification demonstrates that a coach has the ability to talk about the holistic financial picture of someone wanting to return to school, which means thinking about additional considerations like mortgages and retirement— not just tuition costs.

Zachery completed the certification in April of 2024, right when AI was becoming a major topic in the professional world and companies were releasing Q1 earnings reports that detailed how AI was impacting their businesses. Despite this, he didn’t quite understand how AI would impact him in his role, but he wanted to find out.

He looked into Google certificates, and took two different AI certificate courses that were covered by EdAssist’s benefits. Following the two AI courses, he completed a project management certificate in October of 2024, which was exceptionally robust and included templates he could leverage in his current role.

He completed all of his continued education over a six to eight month period, and walked away with plenty to show for it.

The benefits of asynchronous learning

Zachery already had both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, so he was familiar with structured, semester-based education structures. All of his continued education this time around, however, was asynchronous.

This meant the courses were self-paced, allowing him to chip away at the work whenever he had the free time to do so, even if it was just thirty minutes at a time. And since he found the modules so engaging, he was able to knock them out quickly. He also stressed that the low stakes setting made each goal seem more tangible, removing the barrier of structured time commitments. It created a snowball that generated the avalanche, so to speak, as he kept pursuing more certificates as the momentum kept him going.

For busy adult learners who are unsure of their ability to commit to traditional semester-based programs, asynchronous learning can be an outstanding solution. The educational industry has evolved greatly, and there are even some formal degree programs that offer asynchronous learning options. EdAssist’s academic coaches can help learners find the right learning structure and system for you, whether it’s a certificate program or a more traditional school.

How Zachery is applying his knowledge in his current role

Zachery is about a year out from his intense burst of continued education, and has found multiple opportunities to include new concepts and thought methodologies throughout his team’s organizational processes.

This was something the project management course had advocated for: You have plenty of ideas, but it’s important to quantify where the priorities are and what initiatives will deliver the most value.

The College Coach team has put together an AI think tank, which is now tackling three objectives:

• Identifying opportunities to improve organizational or educator efficiencies using Copilot.
• Understanding how high school students are exposed to AI.
• Determining how admissions and financial aid offices are or are not not using AI.

When assessing opportunities through CoPilot, the team identified 15 different opportunities that could— in theory— support a particular process. They then went through and assessed the ideas both in terms of the prospective value it could deliver and the resource cost it would require. This made use of both his project management and AI coursework.

Maintaining a competitive edge with ongoing education

Continued education— whether through formal degree programs, certificates, or certifications— has always been an invaluable way to develop new skills and gain a competitive professional edge.

Now, it’s almost a necessity. AI is an outstanding example, as it’s evolving so quickly and businesses are evolving alongside it. Zachery is confident that learners and professionals who learn and grow alongside the technology will be better off compared to those who avoid it, especially since it’s changing so quickly that in three or four years, you could find yourself playing catch-up.

He gave the example of helping an older relative with technology, who may not understand that spam emails are a concern or that phishing campaigns can be destructive. This new technology is the same way— it’s essential to grow alongside it so that you understand it when you fully need it.

This is true for all continued education, even if the courses you’re interested in seem incompatible with your role. Zachery is not a project manager, for example, but has benefited immensely by taking concepts from his project management coursework and applying it to his daily work. But it’s particularly critical for new tech like AI, which will very likely touch all workers in the near future.

It’s important to grow alongside technology, in whatever way that looks like for you, and continued education can play a critical role in helping you do so.