The Second Act of Education

For decades, education has been organised around visible milestones.

A child enters school. A student completes a degree. A professional earns a qualification. Each stage produces something institutions can record: attendance, credits, examination results and diplomas.

Yet learning rarely follows such a clean sequence.

It happens when an employee assumes responsibility for a project they have never managed before. When a parent develops an understanding of developmental psychology while supporting a child. When someone moves country and learns to navigate another language, culture and administrative system. When an experienced executive enters a new industry and discovers that much of what they know is transferable, even if their qualifications suggest otherwise.

These experiences may fundamentally alter what a person knows and can do. Most remain difficult for education and employment systems to capture.

A new OECD framework published today exposes the scale of this blind spot. It finds that current data systems often cover limited age groups, fail to follow people’s development over time, concentrate heavily on labour market outcomes and inadequately capture informal learning.

The problem is not merely statistical.

What education systems fail to capture is difficult to recognise consistently. And what remains unrecognised rarely carries the same weight in funding, credentialing or policy.

Education still assumes a linear life

Most education systems were built around a relatively stable progression: study first, work afterwards, retire later.

That architecture is becoming increasingly detached from reality. Careers now evolve across sectors, technologies and geographies. At the same time, ageing populations and longer working lives are extending the period during which people must remain professionally, socially and intellectually adaptable.

The demographic shift is substantial. The United Nations projects that by 2050, one in six people globally will be over 65, compared with one in 11 in 2019.

Europe is already further along this trajectory. People aged 65 and over represented 22 per cent of the European Union’s population in 2025, while the median age reached 44.9. By 2050, nearly one third of the EU population is projected to be 65 or older.

These figures are usually discussed through the language of pensions, healthcare and dependency. They should also be understood as an educational challenge.

If people are living and working for longer, learning cannot remain concentrated in the first two decades of life. Adults may need to retrain several times, navigate technologies that did not exist when they first entered employment and prepare for roles that have yet to be defined.

For a growing number of people, their forties and fifties are no longer the final stage of an established career. With another 15, 20 or even 25 years of professional life ahead, they may represent the beginning of an entirely new one.

Some people are responding to automation or the decline of their sector. Others want to move towards work offering greater meaning, flexibility or social impact. Many possess substantial leadership and operational experience but discover that universities and employers do not always know how to translate that experience into a new professional context.

They are not starting again. They are building from two or three decades of knowledge that may not fit neatly into an admissions form, job description or conventional qualification.

Formal education captures only part of adult learning

The language of lifelong learning has become familiar. The infrastructure required to support it has not.

Across OECD countries, only 8 per cent of adults participate in formal education, compared with 37 per cent in non-formal learning. Much of the learning that adults undertake therefore happens outside traditional academic programmes.

The knowledge acquired through work and other settings does not always translate easily into academic credit or professional mobility. Recognition of prior learning remains uneven. In parts of Europe, individual higher education institutions retain discretion over whether prior learning can count towards admission or academic credit.

Employers, meanwhile, continue to use qualifications as an important screening mechanism. Yet the OECD found that during periods of constrained labour supply, employers removed degree requirements from 46 per cent of middle skill roles and 31 per cent of high skill roles.

The finding raises a legitimate question. How many qualifications represent an essential requirement, and how many remain a convenient proxy for capabilities that institutions have not learned to assess directly?

This is particularly relevant to migrants, carers, entrepreneurs, military veterans, career changers and those who entered employment before completing higher education. It can also affect neurodivergent learners whose capabilities may be demonstrated more effectively through practice, portfolios or projects than through traditional examinations.

Their knowledge is real. Its institutional visibility is not.

The result is an expensive contradiction. Economies need experienced people to adapt, retrain and remain productive. Yet many of the institutions expected to support that transition continue to treat midlife learners as exceptions.

Measurement determines whose learning matters

Measurement is often treated as a neutral exercise conducted after learning has taken place. In practice, it helps determine which forms of learning systems are designed to produce.

If success is measured primarily through qualification completion and employment outcomes, institutions will naturally prioritise qualifications and employability. Both matter. But they represent only part of education’s value.

Learning can also affect confidence, health, financial judgement, civic participation, adaptability and the ability to navigate technological and social change. These outcomes are harder to isolate and therefore easier to overlook.

Informal learning presents an even greater challenge. It may have no defined curriculum, teacher or assessment. Individuals may not recognise it as learning at all.

That does not make it insignificant.

The OECD’s proposed approach treats learning as something that occurs throughout life and across multiple settings. This could allow policymakers to examine not only who enters formal education, but who continues to learn, where that learning occurs and which populations are excluded from opportunities to develop or demonstrate their capabilities.

The question is therefore not only whether lifelong learning is available, but whether people can realistically participate. Time, cost, employer support, digital access and the recognition of previous experience all influence who can return to education. Expanding the number of courses will achieve little if the people who need them cannot fit them around work, caring responsibilities and financial commitments.

From educational institutions to learning institutions

Better measurement will be useful only if it produces better recognition and better institutional design.

Universities should be able to assess what people know, regardless of where that knowledge was acquired. This does not mean treating every experience as equivalent to a degree. It means creating credible ways to demonstrate capability through recognition of prior learning, competency based assessment, portfolios, modular qualifications and portable learning records.

Programmes must also reflect the realities of adult lives. Someone changing career in their forties or fifties may be managing work, children, ageing parents and financial responsibilities simultaneously. Requiring that person to pause their life and return to a model designed primarily for an 18 year old is not necessarily a test of academic ability. It may simply be a test of who can afford to participate.

Employers have a similar responsibility. If organisations want adaptable workforces, learning cannot remain confined to annual training programmes or reserved for employees considered to have the longest careers ahead of them. It must be embedded in responsibilities, mentoring, mobility and everyday work.

The most important shift, however, may be conceptual.

Schools and universities have traditionally been places people attend in order to learn. In a lifelong learning society, their role becomes broader. They must help people identify, continue, connect and validate learning accumulated across different chapters of life.

This does not diminish the value of formal education. It allows institutions to remain relevant as people’s lives, careers and ambitions evolve.

People seeking to pivot in their forties and fifties are not a marginal audience for continuing education. In ageing societies, they are becoming one of its most important constituencies.

The future of education will not be defined only by what happens between enrolment and graduation. It will be shaped by whether institutions remain present as people’s circumstances, ambitions and economies change.

In an ageing world shaped by repeated career reinvention, lifelong learning is no longer an extension of the university’s mission. It is becoming the test of whether that mission remains relevant.