This past week, I had the opportunity to attend CEdMA’s empowerED25 conference in sunny Austin, TX. 😎
Living up to the hype, I think this was the best empowerED conference yet! Customer education pros flew in from around the world for 3 days of networking, learning, and eating amazing food. 🤤
For those who weren’t able to attend live, here were my top 5 takeaways from the sessions I attended:
1. Educational Ecosystems Are the Future of Scalable Customer Success
The whole conference kicked off with a keynote from Adam Avramescu. A long-time customer education leader and practitioner, Adam talked about building educational ecosystems. This isn’t a range of programs, but something that’s branded, with a connected UI and unified goals and operations.
Like with anything in customer education, these ecosystems aren’t one-size-fits-all; they must be designed around customer profiles, business goals, and the skills required for success.
Dee Kapila, the day two keynote, built on this idea using her work at Miro as an illustration. Dee started at Miro as the Head of Customer Education, and grew into the Head of Scaled Customer Experience (CX). Miro’s Scaled CX team combines a variety of programs, including education, digital success, community, and AI-driven content, to support customers throughout their journey.
Together, Adam and Dee’s sessions made it clear: the future of customer education lies in thoughtfully designed ecosystems that are adaptable, data-driven, and deeply integrated with the broader customer journey.
2. Certifications Need Strategy, Alignment, and Patience to Drive Impact
Silvie Liao hosted a session on lessons learned growing a certification program. Her presentation underscored the need for thoughtful planning and alignment. Rushing a certification to market without clear definitions, job task analysis, or pilot testing can lead to confusion and credibility issues. Instead, certifications should be treated as products, aligning with company OKRs and focused on one core audience at a time.
3. Proving ROI Means Speaking the Language of the Business
Tom Studdert and Kevin Dunn both emphasized that customer education leaders need to communicate in business terms to prove their value. ROI isn’t just about participation rates—it’s about retention, product usage, customer lifetime value, and revenue impact.
Tom shared the importance of aligning education initiatives with business goals and building an “adoption ladder” to demonstrate how education contributes to key outcomes. Kevin offered practical frameworks for measuring impact, using AI to analyze data and prioritize requests, and building feedback loops that drive continuous improvement.
4. Retention Is the Metric That Matters Most
Kat Breeggemann walked us through a four-step process of proving how education impacts retention:
- Step 1: Form your hypothesis.
- Step 2: Determine the metrics you need to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
- Step 3: Get retention metrics from your data or finance team.
- Step 4: Prove your hypothesis by looking at the impact of education on retention (or how education prevented churn or downgrades).
But it doesn’t stop there! Kat recommended evangelizing results widely—through leadership meetings, newsletters, Slack channels, and cross-functional meetings—and using those insights to request more resources, drive targeted campaigns, and support upsell opportunities.
5. Scaling Learning Requires Flexibility, Automation, and Community
Daniel Quick’s talk on learning at scale outlined four key pillars: adaptability, flexibility, flow, and community. Scaling isn’t just about more content; it’s about building processes that can evolve alongside the business without adding proportional costs. Daniel suggested modular content strategies, standardized templates, and leveraging automation and AI as ways to increase efficiency.
Get All the Notes
You can read my full notes from the sessions I attended here. (My ask: If you find these helpful, shoot me a message on LinkedIn!)
