Canada already has one of the world’s most educated workforces. The next challenge may be building an education system for people who need to keep learning long after their first credential.

A Registered Nurse with nearly a decade of clinical experience decides she wants to explore another side of patient care. A fitness instructor who has spent six years working closely with clients begins training for a different profession. A single mother works full-time while studying during evenings and weekends, then opens a business from home. Another nurse isn’t looking to leave healthcare at all; an interest in dermatology has simply become persistent enough that she wants to see where it might lead.

At first glance, these people have little in common. Over the past several years, however, I have watched versions of each pass through La Vie Academy, where we work with adults entering or expanding their careers in medical aesthetics. Some arrive knowing precisely what they intend to do. Others are exploring an interest or trying to find a profession that fits a life that has changed.

Watching them has changed the way I think about adult education. We still tend to imagine education as something concentrated near the beginning of life: study first, acquire a credential, then spend the next several decades working. But many of the adults returning to education today have already followed that sequence. They have degrees, careers, children, mortgages, businesses and years of professional experience. They aren’t necessarily returning because their original education failed them. They are returning because work—and life—kept moving.

A Highly Educated Country That Keeps Learning

Canada does not suffer from a shortage of credentials. In 2025, 64% of Canadians aged 25 to 64 held a college or university credential, up from 55% a decade earlier. The comparable OECD average was 41%.[1] By conventional measures, Canada already has a remarkably educated adult population.

Yet education clearly doesn’t end with those credentials. Statistics Canada found that 29.7% of working Canadians aged 25 to 64 participated in job-related non-formal training during the 12 months ending in November 2024. This included structured courses, seminars and other forms of training outside the formal education system.[2] Participation was particularly high in health occupations, where 48% of workers reported undertaking this kind of training.[2]

Those figures point toward a distinction that matters. Much of the conversation about education still centres on young people preparing to enter the workforce, while a substantial part of learning is taking place among people already inside it. They are not deciding what they want to become for the first time; they are updating, extending or redirecting capabilities they already possess.

I explored this idea recently in Forbes Business Council, arguing that credentials will remain important but are increasingly better understood as foundations rather than endpoints.[3] When industries, technologies and tools change repeatedly during a working life, the knowledge acquired at 22 cannot reasonably be expected to remain sufficient at 42 or 52. The more interesting question is how people continue learning without repeatedly stepping away from the lives and careers they have already built.

When an Experienced Professional Becomes a Student Again

Healthcare makes the tension particularly visible. Registered Nurses who enter medical aesthetics already possess clinical education, experience with patients and an understanding of safety. None of that disappears when they enter another area of practice, but neither does it make the new technical knowledge automatic.

One nurse we trained had spent nearly a decade in the profession before moving into medical aesthetics. Another wasn’t looking to leave nursing at all. She had developed an interest in dermatology and wanted to explore it further. Both arrived with substantial professional experience, and both still had to become beginners in specific ways: learning unfamiliar treatments, practising techniques and accepting correction from instructors.

There is something useful in that combination of expertise and inexperience. We often describe education as a progression from novice to professional, but longer working lives increasingly require people to move in both directions. Someone can be highly competent in one domain and a novice in another without those identities contradicting each other.

This is one reason the language of “starting over” has always struck me as inaccurate. An experienced nurse doesn’t become inexperienced simply because she learns a new specialty. She brings clinical judgement, patient communication and years of accumulated knowledge with her. What she needs is an educational environment capable of recognizing what already transfers while being rigorous about what does not.

The same principle appeared in a graduate who had spent almost six years as a fitness instructor before entering medical aesthetics. She had no background performing aesthetic treatments and needed to learn the technical work from the beginning. But six years of listening to clients, discussing what they wanted to change, managing expectations and maintaining long-term relationships did not suddenly become irrelevant. Her previous career followed her into the next one in ways that were less visible than a credential but still professionally useful.

Adult Learners Have Adult Lives

If previous experience changes what adults bring into education, their responsibilities change how education must reach them. A working parent does not have the same relationship with time as a student whose primary occupation is studying. Neither does a nurse working shifts, someone running a business or an employee who cannot afford to leave work for an extended period.

One of our graduates was a single mother working full-time while studying medical aesthetics. Her responsibilities did not disappear when she enrolled. She completed theory around work and family obligations, using evenings and weekends, while the practical portion still required her to attend in person. After graduation, she opened a home-based spa, allowing her work to fit more naturally around motherhood.

Her experience illustrates an important distinction. Making education flexible does not require making it less demanding. It requires asking which parts of learning genuinely depend on a particular place and time. Theory may sometimes be taught effectively online, while technical skills require equipment, supervision, repetition and another human being in the room. The challenge is not choosing between convenience and rigour; it is designing each part of the learning experience around what it is actually trying to accomplish.

This question extends far beyond one industry. The Government of Canada’s Future Skills Council has called for customized short-term training, microcredentials, flexible and online learning, modular programs and other approaches that allow workers to continue developing skills while remaining employed.[4] The underlying problem is straightforward: if lifelong learning requires adults to repeatedly leave the workforce for years at a time, lifelong learning will remain impractical for a large portion of the population.

Skills and Credentials Are Not Opponents

The rise of skills-based education can easily be misunderstood as an argument against universities, colleges or traditional credentials. I think that framing creates a false choice. There are professions in which extensive foundational education, supervised practice and established standards are indispensable, and no collection of short courses should pretend to replace them.

The more useful question is what happens after the credential has been earned. A nursing degree can provide a strong clinical foundation while a nurse continues acquiring specialized capabilities throughout her career. A business graduate may understand finance and strategy while needing to learn how artificial intelligence changes the way those disciplines are practised. A marketer can have excellent foundational training and still encounter technologies five years later that barely existed when that training began.

In that sense, skills-based learning works best not as a substitute for deep education but as a way of keeping deep education useful. Foundational knowledge provides frameworks and judgement; continued learning allows people to apply those foundations as occupations evolve.

This matters because the pace of change is unlikely to slow. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on responses from more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 55 economies, found that employers expect 39% of workers’ existing core skills to change or become outdated between 2025 and 2030.[5] This is a global employer survey rather than a prediction specifically about Canadian workers, and it should be read accordingly. But it captures the scale of the challenge facing education systems built around the assumption that most professional learning happens near the beginning of a career.

Designing Education for Lives Already in Progress

The answer cannot be to send people back for another four-year degree every time technology changes, just as it cannot be to pretend that a weekend course can replace years of expertise. The more difficult—and more consequential—work lies between those extremes.

We need educational pathways that allow adults to acquire serious, applicable skills without pretending their existing knowledge has no value. That means recognizing prior experience where it genuinely transfers, preserving hands-on learning where competence requires practice, and using technology where it can make education more accessible without compromising what students actually need to know.

It also means accepting that the adult learner is not a single type of person. We have seen graduates arrive with plans to open businesses and others who were still trying to determine what kind of career they wanted. Some were healthcare professionals adding capabilities to an existing profession; others were moving into an entirely different field. One was rebuilding her working life after a serious motor vehicle accident and traumatic brain injury. A full scholarship removed the financial barrier to her education, but the learning, practicum and eventual move into employment were still hers to complete.

These stories resist the tidy sequence on which much of our educational thinking was built. People learn, work, raise families, develop interests, encounter new technologies, discover gaps in what they know and sometimes decide that the career they chose years earlier no longer fits. Then they return to learning, often without abandoning everything that came before.

Canada’s challenge, therefore, may be less about convincing people that education matters than about building educational systems suited to the way adults actually live. Universities and colleges will remain part of that landscape, as will private career institutions, workplace training, online education, professional development and emerging forms of microcredentials. The opportunity is not to decide which model replaces the others, but to understand where each is most useful across a working life that may span four or five decades.

For much of the last century, one of the defining educational questions was: What should I study to prepare for my career?

That question still matters. But for a highly educated country confronting technological change and longer, less linear careers, another question is becoming just as important:

What do I need to learn next?

References

[1] Statistics Canada. “Educational attainment in Canada has continued to rise over the past decade, 2025.” The Daily, March 25, 2026. Statistics Canada reports that 64% of Canadians aged 25–64 held a college or university credential in 2025, compared with 55% in 2015 and an OECD average of 41%.

[2] Statistics Canada. Etmanski, Brittany. “Training participation, 2024.” Quality of Employment in Canada, August 18, 2025. Based on a supplement to the Labour Force Survey. Statistics Canada reports that 29.7% of Canadian workers aged 25–64 participated in job-related non-formal training during the 12 months ending November 2024; participation among workers in health occupations was 48%.

[3] Husain, Mo. “Why The Next Generation Of Employees Will Need Skills, Not Just Credentials.” Forbes Business Council, September 23, 2026. The article examines continuous skills development alongside foundational credentials as technology and workplace requirements evolve.

[4] Future Skills Council, Government of Canada. Canada – A Learning Nation: A Skilled, Agile Workforce Ready to Shape the Future. The report recommends expanded access to customized short-term training, microcredentials, flexible and online learning, modular programs and approaches that allow workers to develop skills while remaining employed.

[5] World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025. Published January 7, 2025. The report draws on more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. Employers surveyed expected 39% of workers’ existing core skills to change or become outdated over the 2025–2030 period.

About the Graduate Examples

The graduate experiences referenced in this article are drawn from La Vie Academy graduate profiles and student outcome stories. Identifying details have been omitted because the examples are used to examine broader patterns in adult learning rather than as individual testimonials. Individual experiences should not be interpreted as guarantees of employment, business ownership, income or other career outcomes.

About the Author

Mo Husain is Executive Director of La Vie Academy. His work and writing focus on education innovation, skills-based learning, workforce development and how emerging technologies are changing the way people learn and work.