A nationwide survey of adults by LinkedIn and SimpsonScarborough shows a significant increase in adults interested in education—at nearly 50%. Of those, 80% indicated an interest in pursuing that education online.

That may not be surprising, but reader beware.

To gain the full impact from the research, higher education institutions must look beneath the reported averages and aggregated totals of adults. Not doing so could cause institutions to lump prospective learners together who are seeking more education for two fundamentally different sets of reasons—or Jobs to Be Done—and therefore must be recruited and served differently.

Conflating these two Jobs to Be Done and creating messaging that targets all adults based on their demographic and average motivation would be a mistake.

To be clear, the reported survey results don’t segment the adults by causality and circumstance, but big clues in the report suggest that two distinct sets of reasons exist.