If you thought the last exam of college or grad school marked the end of your education, then you should take the following news sitting down—maybe at a desk with a No. 2 pencil.
Your schooling might not be over yet. Not if you’re a chief executive or think of yourself as CEO material, anyway.
Executive education programs are flourishing as business leaders confront an AI landscape they couldn’t have imagined when they were last in a classroom. Leading a company has always required ongoing learning, but the pace and scale of change brought on by artificial intelligence is driving more executives to seek formal instruction.
By one estimate, from Persistence Market Research, the executive education market will rapidly expand, growing from $55.1 billion this year to $115.7 billion in 2033.
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Beyond technology itself, the AI boom raises thorny questions about what ethical, human-centered leadership should look like. CEOs and other senior leaders are flocking to campuses from Harvard Business School to Texas A&M to wrestle with these contemporary challenges.
Some programs require participants to sign nondisclosure agreements, so executives can trade stories and tips in confidence.
In the University of Wyoming’s Cowboy Leadership Experience—the best-named executive education program, hands down—participants reckon with harsh truths about human nature. They consider hypotheticals, like what you would do if you dinged a car in a parking lot.
“Everybody says, ‘Of course, I’d leave a note,’” says Chase Thiel , senior associate dean at the University of Wyoming. “Then we show them the data on what people actually do in these situations and say, ‘You may, but the data says 70% or 80% of you are lying.”
That leads to conversations about what makes it hard to do the right thing. In business, there are often competing factors that complicate ethical decisions. For example, coming clean about a mistake—ostensibly the right thing to do—could mean losing a client and having to eliminate jobs because of the lost revenue.
“You get people opening up, and people start sharing, ‘Well, I’ve been in that situation that you’re now facing,’” Thiel says.
Executive education programs are generally weekend affairs or short-term immersions to accommodate busy schedules. No one leaves with a degree, and there is only so much teaching that organizers can pack into a few days.
In some cases, the main takeaway is that a certain topic is not in a CEO’s wheelhouse and ought to be delegated.
If you assume that completing an executive education program at a brand-name school like Wharton or Harvard Business School is a feather in any CEO’s cap, think again. I was stunned when former HBS Dean Nitin Nohria , who helps lead the school’s New CEO Workshop, told me that only one in four business leaders who are invited to participate accept the offer. Those who say yes often feel overwhelmed by the demands of their new roles.
“They say, ‘Oh, my God, I thought I was master of the universe, but I’m not feeling like a master of the universe,’” Nohria says.
One of the workshop participants’ first assignments is to write their retirement speeches. Imagining what they might say, and how they’d want to be remembered, in a decade or more has a way of clarifying what’s really important.
This is an exercise anyone could do, but sometimes it takes the structure of school to make us do educational tasks.
Camaraderie is as much a draw as the promise of new knowledge and skills. It’s lonely at the top, as the saying goes, and many executives have described to me a sense of precarity that their predecessors didn’t face—at least not to the same extent.
To them, it feels like yes-men have been replaced by skeptical employees who are more likely to shred them on Reddit or Glassdoor than to brown-nose. They are spooked by embarrassing episodes in which CEOs’ inelegant internal remarks were secretly recorded and leaked online.
I’ve written about the heart attacks, ulcers and other health risks that can accompany life in the C-suite.
Still, most of us don’t want to hear executives with seven-figure salaries complain about the trials and tribulations of their jobs. So, they turn to each other.
“There’s a lot of commiserating,” says Troy Cormier , CEO of the Jason’s Deli chain that has 200-plus locations across more than two dozen states. Being a leader means crediting others when things go well, he adds. “And all the bad we take blame for.”
Cormier earned an executive M.B.A. at Texas A&M when he was the company’s chief financial officer. Now in the top post, he continues his education by attending lunch-and-learn events; the most recent one was about AI. I reached him as he was driving home from a professional-development retreat with his company’s leadership team.
Setting an example is another reason why CEOs go back to school, says Stephen Courtright, who directs the Flippen Leadership Institute at Texas A&M and previously led executive education at the University of Iowa.
“When CEOs are deep into learning, they set up cultures of learning,” he says. “CEOs are the ultimate culture creators.”
So, if your boss is giving up their weekend to attend an executive education program, that might be your hint to keep expanding your skill set, too.