Peter Hirst and I have gotten to know each other through serving on the 2U University Partner Advisory Council. At MIT, Peter serves as the senior associate dean for executive education at the Sloan School of Management. I asked if Peter would be willing to answer my questions, and he graciously agreed.
Q: Tell us about your role at MIT. What are the main programs, initiatives, services and projects that you lead and are most excited about?
A: I serve as senior associate dean for executive education at the MIT Sloan School of Management. I lead a team of over 70 professionals who partner with MIT Sloan faculty, individual executives and organizations around the world to design and deliver nondegree executive education programs.
That includes open-enrollment programs for individual leaders, custom programs for companies and other organizations, executive certificate pathways, and online, in-person and hybrid learning experiences. The work ranges from helping a single executive find the right program for their development goals to working with a company on a major strategic capability-building effort.
Online learning is now a central part of that effort, not a side activity. One of the things I am proud of is that MIT Sloan Executive Education has built one of the larger and more successful portfolios of online executive education programs in our industry. That has not been about replacing the classroom. It has been about extending access, creating more flexible ways for busy executives to learn and building learning experiences that can connect high-quality ideas with real-world practice at scale.
What I enjoy most is that executive education sits right at the intersection of ideas and action. MIT has this wonderful tradition of mens et manus, mind and hand, and that is very much how I think about what we do and why and how we do it. Ideas need to be serious and rigorous, but they also need to help people do something differently when they get back to work.
The area I am probably most excited about right now is the relationship between AI, leadership and organizational change. Of course, executives need to understand what AI is and what it can do. But the more interesting question is how leaders should make decisions, redesign work, build trust, develop people and create value when technology is moving so quickly. I do not think the answer is simply “more AI content.” The deeper challenge is helping leaders ask better questions and build organizations that can learn and adapt.
Paradoxically, I think AI is making human skills more important, not less. Judgment, curiosity, communication, ethical reasoning, collaboration, leadership and the ability to frame good questions are becoming more valuable as machines become more capable. That is a very exciting challenge for executive education.
At its best, executive education creates a space where very capable, very busy people can step back, engage with faculty research, learn from each other, test their assumptions and return to work with more clarity and confidence. That is still a pretty compelling mission.
Q: What has been the career path that brought you to your current leadership role at Sloan? How has executive education changed over the course of your career?
A: My path has been a little unusual, although it makes sense to me in hindsight. I trained originally as a physicist, earning my undergraduate degree and Ph.D. in physics at Scotland’s University of St Andrews. I then moved into science and technology policy, including work at the U.K. Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, where I advised members of Parliament on issues in the physical sciences, defense and information technology.
That experience shaped how I think about expertise. It is not enough for knowledge to be right in some abstract sense. It has to be translated into decisions, institutions, policies, products and action. That has probably been a theme throughout my career.
My first serious exposure to online learning came around 2000, when I was involved in an early consortium of about half a dozen highly respected business schools exploring what digital learning might make possible. Looking back, a lot of the technology was primitive by today’s standards, and some of the assumptions were probably overoptimistic. But the core question was exactly the right one: How could high-quality management education reach more people, in more places, in more flexible ways, without losing the quality and trust that make university-based education distinctive?
I have worked across strategy, technology, commercialization, consulting, entrepreneurship and organizational leadership. Before coming to MIT Sloan, I was CEO of the commercialization, consulting and executive education business of the London School of Economics. So I did not come into executive education through a traditional academic program administration route. I came into it through a mix of science, policy, business, technology and practical problem-solving.
Executive education has changed enormously. When I started, it was still very possible to think of it primarily as a campus-based experience: Senior people stepping away from work for a few days or weeks, learning from faculty and peers and then going back to their organizations. That model still matters. In fact, in a world of endless digital noise, the in-person experience may be more valuable than ever when it is done well.
But the field is now much more global, digital, competitive and outcomes-focused. Participants and organizations are asking harder questions: What will change because of this? How does it connect to strategy? How do we scale learning beyond the people in the room? How do we know whether it worked?
At MIT Sloan Executive Education, I have had the opportunity to help oversee the development of what has become one of the industry’s larger and more successful online executive education portfolios. That has reinforced for me that online learning is not one thing. It can mean asynchronous learning, live online learning, hybrid programs, AI-supported learning, coaching, peer interaction, practice, feedback and community. The interesting question is not whether online is better or worse than in-person. The interesting question is what each modality is best suited to do and how we design learning experiences that take advantage of those strengths.
Now AI is opening the next chapter. I do not think AI makes human learning less important. I think it raises the bar. If knowledge is more abundant, then judgment matters more. If content is easier to generate, then trust matters more. If answers are easier to produce, then the ability to frame the right question matters more. That is why I think the future of executive education will be both more technological and more human.
Q: What advice would you give an early or midcareer professional who would like to eventually move into a leadership role in executive education and/or online learning?
A: First, roll your sleeves up. Executive education is a very practical business. You can learn a lot from strategy papers and conferences, but you also need to understand what actually happens when a participant arrives, a faculty member walks into the room, a client changes the brief, the technology fails, the catering is wrong or a program director has to solve six problems before breakfast. The details matter because the experience matters.
That is even more true in online learning. It is very easy to talk about platforms, scale and innovation in the abstract. But the real learning stems from the design details: how the participant is welcomed, how expectations are set, how faculty presence comes through, how peer interaction is structured, how assignments connect to work, how feedback is provided and how the experience keeps a busy executive engaged when the rest of life is competing for attention.
Second, build range. Executive education sits across academia, business, pedagogy, technology, sales, marketing, operations, finance and client advisory work. You do not have to be an expert in all of those things, but you do need to understand how they connect. The people who do well in this field can translate between different worlds.
Third, be curious. Spend time with faculty, participants, learning designers, program managers, corporate clients, alumni and technology partners. Ask what is working and what is not. Pay attention to where the real pain points are. A lot of innovation in this field comes from noticing the friction that everyone else has learned to work around.
Fourth, get involved in the ecosystem. Organizations like UNICON are valuable because they connect you with peers who are wrestling with similar questions. But I would also encourage people to join trade associations, business organizations and other networks outside higher education. Executive education serves the world of work, so you need to stay close to how that world is changing.
Fifth, choose employers carefully. Look for organizations that can show, not just say, that they invest in their people. If you want to grow into leadership, you need places that give you responsibility, stretch assignments, mentoring, exposure to senior decision-making and room to learn from mistakes. Culture matters enormously.
And finally, do not assume the only route into executive education or online learning is through a traditional university career path. There is plenty of room for entrepreneurial people who can help solve real problems at scale. If you can improve access, quality, personalization, measurement, learner support, client engagement or the economics of delivery, there are many ways into the field. Our industry needs people who can combine educational values with practical imagination.
In fact, my advice to entrepreneurial people would be: Help us solve a real problem. Help us make high-quality learning more accessible. Help us make online learning more engaging and more human. Help us use AI to support reflection, practice, feedback and transfer back to work. There is still a lot to build, and new technologies, especially AI, are simultaneously creating new needs and opportunities and lowering barriers to innovation, scaling and impact.
