Director of Continuing Education Job Description

A Director of Continuing Education runs the side of a college that serves people who are not enrolled in a degree program: working adults picking up a certificate, licensed professionals who need renewal hours, retirees taking a language class, and employers who want a cohort of supervisors trained on a deadline. O*NET's job titles file places Continuing Education Director, along with Continuing Education Dean, under Education Administrators, Postsecondary. Some campuses brand the same office as professional education, so a Director of Professional Education holds the same job under another name.

The program portfolio

Position descriptions show how wide the remit runs. Citrus College in California assigns its director full management responsibility for noncredit programs, fee-based community education and the district's high school summer programs, and describes the post as a 12-month academic management position. El Camino College's revised September 2025 classification asks its director to plan, direct and manage noncredit and adult education programs, manage grant funds that help students move into transfer-level coursework or the workforce, and analyze business and community needs based on industry trends, changing technology and job market analysis.

In practice the catalog can run from phlebotomy and forklift certification to QuickBooks, grant writing, project management exam prep and watercolor. The director decides which courses run each term, which get a second section, and which get cut when registrations stall.

The money side

Where a unit is fee-based, as Citrus College's community education program is, the director carries the budget. That means pricing courses so tuition covers instructor stipends, room charges, materials, marketing and the registration platform, then watching weekly enrollment against a break-even number. Contract training adds a second revenue line: a hospital, manufacturer or city department pays for a custom course, and the director scopes it, prices it, staffs it and reports completions back to the client.

Credit, hours and compliance

Some licensed professionals take courses to keep a license or certification current, so record keeping matters. The Continuing Education Unit, which IACET says was defined in 1970 by a national task force under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education, equals ten contact hours. A unit that issues CEUs has to track seat time, assessments and transcripts in a way a licensing board or auditor can check. Units that place programs on a state's eligible training provider list under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act also submit eligibility and performance information on those programs.

The people

The teaching staff can include practitioners who teach a night section, contract trainers, and adjuncts borrowed from credit departments. The director recruits them, writes their agreements, observes classes and fields learner complaints. Program coordinators, registration staff and a marketing specialist may round out the office, depending on the institution.

Education

A master's degree is the usual entry point. El Camino College's minimum qualification is a master's degree in any discipline from an accredited college or university, and Citrus College asks for a master's degree or the equivalent. BLS lists a master's degree as the typical entry-level education for postsecondary education administrators as a whole. Useful fields include adult education, higher education administration, business, public administration and instructional design, but the posts above do not name a required field.

Experience

The written minimums are modest. El Camino requires one year of formal training, internship or leadership experience related to the assignment, and Citrus asks for one year of leadership experience related to the post. El Camino's desired qualifications go further: five years of increasingly responsible leadership or direct experience developing or managing an entrepreneurial or educational program. As a rough guide, people who reach the director chair have usually spent several years as a program coordinator or manager inside a continuing education, workforce or corporate training unit, where they ran budgets and launched courses of their own.

The track record that matters is concrete: programs launched and retired, enrollment growth, contract training revenue, grants won, and credentials learners actually earned. Experience with employer advisory boards and a regional workforce board helps, since those relationships feed the contract pipeline.

Technical skills

• Registration and CRM platforms built for noncredit learners, plus the student information system on the credit side
• Learning management systems such as Canvas, Moodle or D2L Brightspace for online and hybrid sections
• Budget modeling in spreadsheets: break-even enrollment, instructor cost per section, contribution margin by program
• Digital marketing: search ads, email campaigns, landing pages and course listings
• Data reporting for completion, credential attainment and placement, now that federal programs such as Workforce Pell judge programs on outcomes

Regulatory knowledge

A director needs working knowledge of the ANSI/IACET Standard for Continuing Education and Training, the state's eligible training provider rules under WIOA, the Workforce Pell regulations in 34 CFR Part 690, and the licensing board rules for each profession the unit serves, from nursing and real estate to engineering.

Credentials

Credentials are optional. Ones that fit the work include the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) from the ATD Certification Institute, for directors heavy on corporate training, and the Certified Program Planner (CPP) designation from LERN for those focused on program development and marketing. IACET accreditation is organizational, not personal, so it belongs on the unit's resume, not the director's.

Personal traits

The job rewards people who like both the classroom and the spreadsheet: comfortable telling a well-liked instructor that a course is cancelled, and equally comfortable sitting with a plant manager to work out what a new hire needs to learn in the first month.

The federal projection

BLS projects employment of postsecondary education administrators to grow 2 percent from 2025 to 2035, slower than the average for all occupations, with about 14,500 openings a year on average over the decade. Those figures cover the whole occupation, from admissions directors to provosts. BLS does not project continuing education directors separately, so treat the number as the backdrop for campus administration rather than a forecast for this title.

Pay by type of institution

The May 2025 BLS industry data split the occupation by employer. At junior colleges the median for education administrators was $101,900, with a 90th percentile of $170,080. At colleges, universities and professional schools the median was $105,010. The national band on this page runs from $64,560 to $215,620, and the occupation behind it also includes provosts and academic deans.

Workforce Pell opened a new funding route

One federal change since the May version of this page is Workforce Pell. Federal regulations published at 91 FR 29334 on May 19, 2026, and codified as 34 CFR Part 690 Subpart H, let eligible students receive Pell Grants for short workforce programs. A qualifying program requires a minimum of 8 weeks but less than 15 weeks of instruction and at least 150 but less than 600 clock hours, or the credit-hour equivalent. It must have met those conditions for the 12 months before the institution applies, and it must prepare students for high-skill, high-wage or in-demand sectors and occupations.

Outcome rules apply as well. For the 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29 award years, a governor certifies that a program has a completion rate of at least 70 percent within 150 percent of normal time and a job placement rate of at least 70 percent, measured as students employed during the second quarter after exiting. Students in these programs can use Pell Grants but no other Title IV federal student aid. For a director, placement tracking becomes part of whether a program stays eligible.

Training provider accountability

Programs paid for with WIOA Individual Training Accounts must sit on a state list of eligible training providers. Under 20 CFR Part 680, states must review provider eligibility at least every 2 years, and the system is built around informed consumer choice, job-driven training and provider performance. Keeping that information accurate is part of the director's reporting load.

AI and the office workload

UPCEA's July 2026 report from its member AI study groups described study group participants moving from broad discussion of AI experimentation, governance and readiness toward focused conversations about use cases, roadmaps and change management. One student support pilot it described used AI to consolidate data from several systems and flag students for outreach, which increased proactive outreach and cut the time spent preparing individual messages. The same report raised open questions about accountability for AI agents' output and disclosure to students. It also listed data systems, privacy, procurement, cybersecurity and staff capacity among the things successful implementation requires.

Where the career goes

Possible next steps include dean or associate vice president roles over workforce development, extended studies or online learning, and executive posts at workforce boards and training organizations.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

Please consider me for the Director of Continuing Education opening at [College]. For the past six years I have worked in the Workforce and Community Education office at [Current College], first as a program coordinator and for the last three years as program manager for allied health and skilled trades.

In that role I own a catalog of 40 noncredit courses and four short certificate programs. When I took it over, our pharmacy technician course was losing money every term because we ran it in a room too small for the lab component. I moved it to a shared lab at a partner high school on weeknights, renegotiated the instructor agreement, and added a second cohort. The course now breaks even with eleven students and has filled three straight terms.

Employer work is the part of the job I enjoy most. Last year a regional HVAC contractor came to us needing twelve new technicians trained on refrigerant handling before the summer season. I scoped the curriculum with their service manager, priced the contract, found two instructors from the trade, and delivered the course on their schedule. They have since signed a second contract for their dispatch staff.

I also manage our CEU records for nursing and dental continuing education courses, and I rebuilt our completion tracking so that every program now reports credential attainment and follow-up employment to our advisory board each term. That work has made it far easier to answer funders' questions.

[College]'s new manufacturing training center and its partnerships with employers in [Region] are why this opening interests me. I would welcome the chance to talk about how I would grow the catalog while keeping each program accountable for results.

Sincerely, [Your Name]