Get Started With Our Journey Story | A Message From Our CEO Omar Abbosh

Executive Summary

Pearson CEO Omar Abbosh describes the company’s shift toward becoming the world’s lifelong learning company as AI reshapes education and work. The strategy is to build on Pearson’s strengths in assessment and education, invest in growth areas, improve execution and operational consistency, and reinforce a customer-focused performance culture.

Strategy and Business Context

• Company evolution: Pearson moved from a diversified conglomerate toward learning and education, selling businesses including The Economist, the Financial Times, and Penguin Random House between 2012 and 2020.
• Market disruption: The shift from print textbooks—often priced at $200–$300—to digital subscriptions of around $80 put pressure on higher-education revenue, particularly in the U.S.
• Stabilization, 2021–2023: Pearson consolidated disparate assets into five business units with clearer P&L ownership, strengthened cost control, and worked to improve forecasting and financial-market confidence.
• Current challenge: AI is expected to reshape occupations and learning. Customers—including schools, teachers, and employers—are seeking help with policies, tools, workforce readiness, and adapting learning.
• Performance imperative: Stronger operating performance is needed to create capacity for investment in products, services, and people. Abbosh also says some offerings have become dated and need renewed innovation.

Strategy Framework: “1 + 3”

• 1 — Core: Assessments and verification of skills. Pearson aims to remain a leader, expand into more use cases, and innovate continually.
• 3 — Growth areas:
  1. Next-generation education: Apply AI thoughtfully to formal and vocational learning.
  2. Early careers: Help people navigate transitions from education into work, including gaps in apprenticeships, mentorship, and career guidance.
  3. Enterprise skilling: Help employers develop the skills employees need to work effectively alongside AI as jobs and workflows change.

Five Long-Term “Must-Wins”

Abbosh presents these as outcomes Pearson should be able to point to over roughly five years:

• Become the undisputed leader in assessing people’s skills.
• Shorten the time needed to bring learning and assessment experiences to market as new disciplines and needs emerge.
• Design products and learning experiences with AI capabilities in mind, anticipating how models may evolve over the next six to nine months.
• Give people portable, validated skills profiles they can use to demonstrate capabilities and identify what to learn next.
• Use Pearson’s position across education and workplace communities to convene stakeholders and guide the responsible use of AI.

Annual Objectives and Performance Measures

For 2026, the company’s priorities include:

• Meet financial commitments and maintain the trust of financial markets.
• Continue innovation and modernization so Pearson keeps pace with changing customer needs.
• Track “power metrics” as leading indicators of business health.
• Attract, develop, retain, and align talent with business priorities.
• Gradually shift investment toward higher-growth markets.

Power Metrics

• Assessment and verification: Track contract renewals and retention, as well as new contracts and revenue growth. Pearson has historically retained contracts at high rates, but no exact rate is given.
• Enterprise skilling: Track the number of larger customers, including “Advanced” and “Elite” customers, described as spending approximately £2.5 million and £10 million annually, respectively. Abbosh says institutional customers are expected to be added to this measure.

These metrics are built into the bonus/AIP measures of employees who participate in the incentive plan.

Operating Model and Execution Playbook

• Keep teams close to customers: Abbosh wants most employees and costs to sit in the business units, where teams can understand customer needs and develop, deliver, and sell relevant products.
• Standardize shared capabilities: Replace fragmented ways of working with more consistent tools and processes for product and software development, large deals and business development, revenue operations and sales, monetization, and customer service.
• Simplify operations to free capacity: Examples include:
  • Consolidating 345 e-commerce sites rather than maintaining numerous separate sites.
  • Reducing reliance on roughly 80 customer-service measures that measured overlapping things.
  • Harmonizing technology stacks, service providers, and marketing vendors.

Project Platinum is cited as an effort to standardize and harmonize these approaches.

Initiative Lifecycle

Move work through four stages:

Strategize → Budget and plan → Implement → Embed in core operations

Initiatives may be cross-functional or cross-business-unit until ownership and ongoing operations are established.

Three Execution Horizons

• Brilliant basics: Run core processes reliably, such as customer service.
• Ground game: Improve current products, services, and sales.
• Air game: Position Pearson for future growth.

Abbosh references the Horizon process (2024), the Air Games process (2025), and Delivery Labs (2026) as evolving approaches to strategic initiatives.

Strengths Pearson Plans to Build On

• Assessment expertise: Pearson can map knowledge to standards set by regulators, governments, and institutions, then measure those standards using psychometric and statistical methods.
• Institutional embeddedness: Relationships and integrations with educators, institutions, school information systems, learning management systems, and financial systems provide access to customers and insight into their needs.
• Trusted workforce and mission: Customer trust and employees’ commitment to helping people progress through learning are described as differentiators.
• Operational scale: Pearson moves millions of people through its verification systems each year, operates across approximately 20,000 physical assessment facilities, and supports millions of digital badges and courses.
• Data and learning science: Content and interaction data, combined with Pearson’s learning-science expertise, can inform stronger products and services.
• Profit base: Abbosh says about 90% of Pearson’s profit streams come from assessments, virtual schools, and print. He characterizes these areas as relatively resilient and says digital courseware can remain competitive through continued innovation and AI adoption.

Culture, Leadership, and Values

• Purpose: “Helping people realize the life they imagine through learning.”
• Values: Curiosity, community, and credibility.
  • Curiosity means continuous learning, innovation, and attention to external developments.
  • Community means helping educators, employers, and policymakers navigate complex choices, including AI in learning.
  • Credibility depends on track record, responsiveness, delivering results, and quality.
• Leadership behaviors: Put customers at the center; collaborate across silos; solve problems from first principles; take ownership and execute; use AI and other tools to raise performance; stretch for better customer outcomes; and energize and inspire colleagues.

Abbosh frames culture change as an individual responsibility: people need to put the purpose, values, and behaviors into practice rather than wait for a formal program to change the organization.

Key Recommendations and Examples

• Design for emerging needs: Build products around changing customer requirements and future AI capabilities rather than relying only on current product assumptions.
• Shorten development cycles: Use AI to accelerate the creation of new content and assessment experiences as new disciplines emerge.
• Make skills portable: Develop validated skill records individuals can carry and share with employers or use to plan further learning.
• Use evidence to guide the market: Conduct efficacy research at scale and connect findings to products and community guidance.
• Reduce duplication: Standardize systems and metrics to redirect time and budgets toward customer-facing improvements.
• Treat customer trust and quality as operating priorities: Pearson’s credibility depends on consistently delivering measurable outcomes.

Metrics and Timelines

• Pearson’s history: approximately 182 years.
• Key business transition periods: 2012–2020 (portfolio shift and print-to-digital disruption); 2021–2023 (stabilization); 2026 (current annual objectives).
• Longer-term ambition: assess progress against the five must-wins over approximately five years.
• AI planning horizon: design with model capabilities in mind over the next six to nine months.
• Operating scale: approximately 20,000 assessment facilities; millions of learners, courses, and digital badges.
• Profit mix: approximately 90% from assessments, virtual schools, and print.
• Operational examples: 345 e-commerce sites and approximately 80 customer-service measures cited as evidence of fragmentation.
• No specific financial growth, margin, or retention targets are stated.

Presenter and sources: Omar Abbosh, Pearson CEO (presenter). Andy Bird and Sally Johnson are mentioned in the historical account of Pearson’s 2021–2023 stabilization.