Bill Hughes

Bill Hughes joins the Lab as President and CEO, where he oversees operations, leads new business initiatives, talent development, communications and marketing strategies, and advocates for the Lab’s expansive portfolio both internally and with stakeholders.

Prior to joining the Lab, Bill was the founder and CEO of JobReady, formed in 2019 in partnership with the National Education Foundation, with the goal to reach the next million job seekers with world-class career skills training. He launched JobReady as a business of Open4 Learning, an ed tech-focused venture development and advisory firm which served clients ranging from the Times of India to Authess (acquired by Elsevier) to the Global Water Center (eradicating lack of access to safe water globally).

Previously, Hughes was chief strategy officer at Learning Objects, where he led its growth strategy, resulting in an acquisition by Cengage in 2015 and the migration of Cengage’s Ed2Go to the Learning Objects platform. Before that, he was vice president of Global Strategy and Business Development at Pearson, leading innovation, partnerships, and new ventures in postsecondary education. While there, he co-founded Intellus Learning (acquired by Macmillan), launched Pearson Writer (2015 product of the year), and oversaw the transformation of Pearson’s learning products into its flagship MyLab platform. Over the past 25 years, Hughes has held leadership positions at Sapient, Mercer, and the Cambridge Innovation Center. In addition, he was a member of the board of trustees of Kaplan University (now Purdue University Global). He currently serves as a board member of Berkshire Bank (NYSE: BHLB) and FineTune Learning.

Hughes holds an AB from Harvard and a SM in Management from MIT, where he was a Seley Scholar.

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