Working in education services might make you feel caught in a time loop. The same challenges keep resurfacing, recurring questions linger, and many organizations struggle with outdated approaches despite evolving business models. So, what’s keeping education services stuck?

For years, education services operated under a traditional capital expense (CapEx) model, where customers made upfront payments for products and services. However, the shift to an operating expense (OpEx) model—where businesses now subscribe to solutions as part of an anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model—has changed everything.

TSIA has been tracking this transition, and the data is clear: education services teams have an urgency to adjust their strategies to fully support XaaS. The State of Education Services 2025 report focuses on three critical areas where education services teams are still stuck and repeating the same mistakes instead of embracing new strategies. If you want to break free from this cycle and position your education services for long-term success, now is the time to modernize outdated approaches.

In this blog, we’ll explore where organizations continue to miss the opportunities and how they can finally get it right. For the full findings and insights, read the State of Education Services 2025 report in the TSIA Portal. 

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Why Education Services Must Evolve

If there’s one non-negotiable in a XaaS business model, it’s product adoption. Customers need to see value quickly and continuously; education services play a key role in achieving that.

Since 2020, education services teams have consistently named product adoption as their primary objective, according to TSIA’s Education Services Benchmark survey data. But there’s a gap between intent and execution. Many organizations still rely on outdated practices that don’t effectively support adoption in an XaaS environment. Instead of applying proven strategies, they attempt half-measures, which leads to stagnation.

Three common missteps keep organizations trapped in the past when it comes to supporting product adoption:

• Underutilizing data analytics: Many teams fail to collect, analyze, and apply data. Without meaningful insights into how customers engage with educational content, optimizing learning experiences for better adoption is unattainable. 
• Relying on free training as a standalone strategy: Free training is often viewed as the solution for driving product adoption. However, education services teams need a more strategic approach to ensure customers get the right training at the right time.
• Creating product-centric, not adoption-centric content: Too often, training content is structured around the product rather than the customer’s journey. Effective education programs align with the product adoption curve, ensuring that content meets users at their stage of familiarity and usage.

Each misstep reflects an old way of thinking in a fundamentally changed industry. To drive product adoption, education services must break free from these patterns and embrace strategies built for a XaaS world.

The Missing Piece: A Content Consumption Strategy

Tracking how customers engage with training content might seem obvious, yet most education services teams don’t have a formal strategy for monitoring content consumption. Measuring success is nearly impossible without clearly defining active consumers, under-consumers, and non-consumers.

Why Data-Driven Insights Matter

TSIA research shows that most education organizations are not using consumption dashboards to track and communicate engagement data internally or externally. This is a major blind spot.

Many organizations lack visibility into even the most fundamental training metrics. A TSIA Driving Content Consumption quick poll found that:

• 24% of education services leaders could not report the annual per-person consumption rate for instructor-led training days.
• 26% didn’t have data for the per-person yearly consumption rate for e-learning hours.

If you don’t have data for customer engagement with training, how can you know if it’s working? Improving content delivery or tailoring learning experiences to boost adoption is nearly impossible without this metric.

Education organizations must implement a structured content consumption strategy to support product adoption. If your team isn’t tracking content engagement, it’s time to start. A well-executed content consumption strategy is no longer optional—it’s essential for driving product adoption in a XaaS world.

Related: Trends in Content Consumption within Education Services

The "Fallacy of Free" in Education Services

Many education services teams assume that offering free training is enough to drive product adoption. The logic seems simple: If the price barrier is removed, customers will eagerly consume learning content, leading to better adoption.

But data tells a different story. According to TSIA’s Driving Content Consumption quick poll, 51% of education organizations say their primary reason for offering free training is to foster product adoption. 

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Yet when consumption rates are analyzed, troubling gaps emerge:

• Only 28% of those using free training for product adoption reported an average of three or more training days consumed per person annually.
• 40% admitted they didn’t know their instructor-led training consumption rates.
• In contrast, 93% of those using free training as a lead-in to fee-based programs reported three or more training days consumed per person annually, with 0% unsure of their consumption rate.

This data makes one thing clear: free training alone is not a reliable strategy for product adoption. Simply making content available for free doesn’t mean customers will engage with it, and organizations that don’t track consumption cannot know whether training impacts it.

For years, TSIA has warned against the fallacy of free—the belief that free training automatically leads to better adoption. The cost of training does not determine adoption—it is by whether customers consume it. That’s why education organizations need a structured free/fee strategy that doesn’t just offer free training but uses it strategically to drive engagement and lead to more profound learning opportunities.

How to Structure a Smart Free/Fee Strategy

Instead of offering free training with no plan for what happens next, organizations should implement a "try it, and you’ll like it" approach. One compelling example is offering a free trial of a learning subscription, where users get 30 days of access to content at no cost, followed by a seamless transition to a paid subscription.

Despite the effectiveness of this model, TSIA’s 2024 Education Services Pricing survey found that only 32% of education organizations offer free trial subscriptions—a missed opportunity to convert interest into long-term learning engagement.

Free training isn’t a silver bullet for product adoption. It's just content on a shelf without a plan to track consumption and convert free users into engaged learners. Education organizations must:

• Develop a structured free/fee strategy that guides learners from free content to deeper engagement.
• Monitor consumption rates to ensure training is making an impact.
• Experiment with free trials that lead to paid learning opportunities.

By shifting from a "free training is enough" mindset to a strategic consumption-driven approach, education services teams can finally break the cycle of ineffective adoption efforts.

Rethinking Content Development: Aligning Training with the Product Adoption Curve

One of the most significant ways education services teams remain stuck in the past is in how they develop training content. Despite the shift to XaaS models, many organizations still create content the old way, focused on the product rather than the customer’s adoption journey.

TSIA’s Content Development Process quick poll reveals a striking disconnect:

• Only 35% of education services teams develop content that aligns with a phase-specific product adoption journey.
• Meanwhile, 79% say they produce micro-learning (shorter, task-based training modules).

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While microcontent is a step in the right direction, it often lacks a crucial element: alignment with the customer's current adoption journey. Without this, even bite-sized content fails to support long-term adoption.

Related: Content Consumption and Learning Subscription Renewals

A Smarter Approach: Training Aligned with the Adoption Journey

Instead of treating training as a one-time, all-encompassing event, education services teams should ask:

• What do customers need to know at each stage of their journey?
• How can training be delivered to support continuous learning rather than “one and done” consumption?

By aligning microcontent with the product adoption curve, education services can:

• Deliver training in smaller, easily consumable units tailored to each phase of the customer’s journey.
• Encourage continuous learning, ensuring that users stay engaged beyond initial onboarding.
• Improve product adoption by ensuring training meets customers where they are instead of overwhelming them with everything at once.

The takeaway? Simply creating microcontent isn’t enough. Microcontent should be built with an adoption curve in mind, ensuring that customers receive the proper training at the right time. Education services teams should rethink their approach to training development because actual adoption isn’t about what customers could learn but what they need to learn at each stage of their journey. 

Related: Aligning Training Content to a Product Adoption Curve

The Future of Education Services 2025

If education services teams want to stop repeating the same mistakes and start driving real product adoption, they must step out of the past and embrace new strategies.

The challenges outlined in this report aren’t new—TSIA has emphasized these best practices for years. Yet, many education organizations continue to ask, “How can we drive product adoption?” The answer is simple: Stop relying on what worked in the past and focus on the strategies that drive meaningful engagement today.

To finally break free from the cycle and modernize education services, organizations should:

• Invest in data analysis: Hiring an education services data analyst can provide critical insights into training consumption patterns.
• Define learner engagement levels: Establish thresholds for active, under-consumers, and non-consumers.
• Develop a structured free/fee strategy: Free training should serve as an entry point, not a final solution. Organizations must move beyond the outdated belief that free training alone drives adoption.
• Monitor content consumption: Use dashboards to track engagement and share insights with customers and internal stakeholders.
• Align training content with the product adoption curve: Microcontent should be designed to match each customer journey stage, ensuring continuous learning instead of one-time training events.

Education services teams must rethink their approach if they genuinely want to drive product adoption. The key to success isn’t just offering more content—it’s ensuring that content is strategic, data-driven, and aligned with customer needs.

By shifting from old habits to a modern, structured approach, education organizations can finally get it right and move toward a future of more substantial product adoption and customer success.

Your Key Takeaways

• Product adoption requires more than intent—it demands strategy: While education services teams consistently rank product adoption as a primary objective, many still rely on outdated methods that don’t fully support a XaaS model. To move forward, organizations must embrace data-driven decision-making, optimize content for continuous engagement, and stop assuming that free training alone will drive adoption.
• Tracking and influencing content consumption is critical: Many organizations lack a structured approach to monitoring training engagement, and a significant portion are unaware of their consumption rates. Implementing dashboards, defining consumer types, and actively prompting content consumption ensures that training leads to meaningful product adoption.‍
• Aligning content with the product adoption curve is the key to long-term success: Most education services teams focus on creating microcontent, but few align it with customers' adoption journeys. Training should be developed based on the learner’s needs at each stage, ensuring continuous engagement rather than a one-time event. Without this alignment, education services risk becoming disconnected from real customer success.