How To Conduct A Competitive Analysis of Professional Development Offerings

Successful associations deftly deliver maximum value to members, minimizing attrition and consistently attracting new organizations. One key element to achieving this position is maintaining the right balance of quality and cost-effectiveness for your professional development offerings. Because you have finite resources, it’s critical to know where you are positioned among your competitors, invest in the right places, and cut anything unnecessary or duplicative. Read on to learn how to conduct a competitive analysis of your association’s professional offerings, the professional development offerings of your competitors, and then set priorities to deliver the biggest impact.

Professional Development Offerings Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis of professional development offerings is a very deliberate process, with a healthy amount of time required to provide actionable information. Your first competitive analysis will be especially time-intensive to conduct, but the steps remain clear and consistent.:

First, conduct an analysis of your association’s professional development offerings.
Second, identify the professional development professionals who either directly or indirectly compete with your organization’s learning and development solutions.
Third, conduct an analysis of competitor professional development offerings.
Fourth, compare the information you acquired about your organization and competitor professional development offerings so you can effectively differentiate, shoring up your value proposition to members.

Analyze Your Organization’s Professional Development Offerings

Start by conducting a 360-degree analysis of your professional development offerings. If your association has been in business for several years, or if you offer professional development to support credentialing, then this may be an extensive and costly activity. But this step will create a foundation of awareness for all future competitive analyses, providing an objective basis for comparison, as you evaluate your offerings in the near term and going forward.

This table is a useful tool for helping organize your evaluative data. The format is scalable, and flexible for analyzing the professional development offerings of most member associations. If a question is not relevant to our particular situation or focus, it can be simply removed or replaced.

Whether you utilize all of these questions, or select some subset of them that best meet your research needs, be consistent and thorough. You want to be able to compare things apples-to-apples after you have surveyed the competition.

Identify Your Competitors

You likely already know who are your closest professional development competitors, even if you have only worked within your particular association for only a few years. But it never hurts to survey the current industry landscape, confirming facts with fresh eyes. Consider discussing briefly with your association’s board of directors to uncover new threats. You can even survey your wider membership to identify direct competitor sources of content, and gain additional insight.

These direct competitors will be similar associations or organizations that:

offer similar products or services,
target the same member audience,
operate in the same geographic area or industry, and/or
offer personal development solutions to the same membership, because of state-level association feeding up into a national or international association (or vice versa).

The first group is fairly easy, but it may be more difficult to identify your indirect competitors. As recommended above, talk with your board members and other association membership to identify some of key threats. Use a list like this one below to help spark insights of who else competes with your association’s professional development efforts indirectly:

Associations that are siphoning away professional development dollars through offerings by sponsors, exhibitors and advertisers.
Online networked communities and social media networks assembled by for-profit and not-for-profit entities alike, sending out content through mailing list acquisition.
Businesses (sponsors, corporate partners, consultants) who sell products and services to association members.
Academic and other educational institutions who are positioned to quickly build skills-focused courses that meet exam and licensure blueprint requirements.
Cooperative purchasing groups that can negotiate supplier discounts, resulting in more cost-effective development offerings.

Defining the scope of competitor professional development offerings you want to examine is subjective. A good starting place is at least three direct and three indirect competitors. But a higher number will proportionately improve your perspective.

After you have identified your the desired number of competitors, it’s time to analyze their specific offerings, just as you did with your own association.

Analyze The Competitors’ Professional Development Offerings

Now it is time to examine each of the competitor’s professional development offerings on your list, just as you did with your own organization. It’s important to utilize the same evaluative data tool you did previously, with a different worksheet for each competitor.

You want to:

create a list of their professional development offerings,
identify who their target audience(s) are,
estimate or confirm their pricing and value proposition,
determine how they market/promote their professional development programs,
glean what the customer feedback is, and
establish a clear idea of their strengths and weaknesses, that could be improved upon.

By formally analyzing competitors, you will quickly find ways to update the analysis of your own association’s professional development offerings. Once you have tweaked that analysis for consistency, you are ready to conduct your competitive analysis.

Conduct Your Competitive Analysis

You should now have a great deal of information at your disposal for conducting the competitive analysis. A SWOT analysis will enable you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current professional development position as compared to your competitors, and highlight ways to address your challenges while maximizing your strength. This analysis also enables you to assess the threats facing your organization due to other competitors’ offerings that you need to shore up. Identifying the opportunities you will want to take advantage of is also part of this effort.

Do the following:

Identify your strengths and weaknesses as compared to those of your competitors. Ask yourself: What are my unique selling points? What are my areas for improvement?
Compare your actual offerings to competitors, asking yourself: How do my programs stack up against each of theirs? Where specifically are the threats to our organization’s position coming from and how do I mitigate those threats?
Identify opportunities to determine the gaps in the market that you can fill and identify unmet needs you can address.
Refine your strategy by answering the following question: How can I improve my programs, pricing, marketing or other aspects of my business to gain a competitive advantage?

Conclusion

Your association exists to serve your members. And the revenue earned through your professional development offerings is one of the top three ways your association obtains the funds it requires to remain solvent. Losing your members’ attention, and money, to one of your many professional development competitors is a clear and unacceptable possibility. Knowing that you have limited dollars available to you, it’s essential that you stay on top of your professional development offerings through competitive analysis so that you continue to deliver high quality and desired professional development to your members.

Written by Sue Ebbers, Ph.D. and published in 2025.

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