* Educational services is the second largest industry, accounting for about 13.5 million jobs in 2008.
* Most teaching positions, which constitute nearly half of all educational services jobs, require at least a bachelor's degree, and some require a master's or doctoral degree.
* Retirements in a number of education professions will create many job openings.
Nature of the Industry About this section
Goods and services. Education is an important part of life. The amount and type of education that individuals receive is a major influence on both the types of jobs they are able to hold and their earnings. Lifelong learning is important in acquiring new knowledge and upgrading one's skills, particularly in this age of rapid technological and economic changes. The educational services industry includes a variety of institutions that offer academic education, career and technical instruction, and other education and training to millions of students each year.

MLM Education

ABCD MLM Multi-Level Marketing advocates are knocking on university doors with an MLM curriculum to secure the industry's future.

Which of the following predictions didn't pan out in the end?
1) "The radio craze will die out in time." Thomas Edison, in 1922
2) "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of the board of IBM, in 1943
3) "Multi-Level Marketing will never be taught in colleges." Curmudgeonly college professors, in 1999
Okay, it was a trick question; all of them turned out to be wrong. If you were stumped by number three, you're not alone. Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) which incorporates network marketing, direct selling, and person-to-person marketing has been "sneered at by academics no matter what its incarnation," admits Michael Sheffield, a cofounder of the Multi-Level Marketing International Association (MLMIA) in Newport Beach, Calif. But that scholarly snubbing may be nearing an end.
Sheffield believes that for network marketing to be completely accepted in the business world, an academic seal of approval needs to be created. That means college courses devoted to MLM and scholarly journals dedicating pages to it. To this end, Sheffield, the president of Sheffield Resource Network, a Multi-Level Marketing consulting firm in Scottsdale, Ariz., helped sponsor the "Organizing for the Future" conference at the University of Texas-EI Paso (UTEP) this past January. Among the 50 attendees were about a dozen professors from such schools as Baylor University and London's University of Westminster as well as executives from network-marketing companies. Their mission: to set a course for bringing MLM into the world of "publish or perish." EDUCATING THE EDUCATORS. "Hey, these people don't have horns!" joked Ray Bagby, Ph.D., associate professor of management at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., who confessed, "I attended because I was curious about Multi-Level Marketing; it's a hugely unresearched area. My idea used to be that these were the kind of people who made you want to shower after you were around them for a while. But when I saw how professional they were and witnessed the way they're tapping into new technologies like the Internet, I admit, my perception changed."
Business schools in particular, comments Doris Wood, a cofounder and now president emerita of the MLMIA, have held a similarly skewed viewpoint. The common perception is that "Multi-Level Marketing is just a method and not actually an industry in and of itself. It's kind of a dirty little secret that companies like Sprint and MCI built themselves into the powers they are today by using Multi-Level Marketing," Wood points out. "But I think the conference changed all that. Those professors left realizing that we are legitimate."

The presentations by MLM executives and professors interested in MLM course work covered a wide span of topics, such as defining industry business practices, streamlining management, working toward reducing turnover, and improving prospecting. Also under discussion was the creation of a certification process for companies and distributors. The conference successfully took academic acceptance of Multi-Level Marketing to the next stage: a proposal was made to found a research center for studying the industry.