Joshua Richards

The technologist who took the top job

Joshua Richards runs Boundless Learning during one of the most unsettled stretches the online education business has faced. The company he leads is barely into life as an independent firm, carved out of the education giant Pearson and asked to prove it can grow on its own. In January 2025 the board handed Richards the wheel, promoting him from Chief Product and Technology Officer to Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. He succeeded Kees Bol, who stepped down to pursue outside opportunities.

What Richards inherited is a business with real scale and a long memory. Boundless Learning has been building online programs for more than 30 years, works with universities and institutions to reach students who might never set foot on a campus, and counts roughly 17,000 active learners spread across more than 150 countries. Over its history it has launched more than 450 online programs. His mandate is to keep that machine running while pushing it into new markets - higher education, corporate training, and the trade body and professional association world.

He is not a caretaker chief executive, and he did not arrive from outside with a turnaround playbook. Richards helped build the thing he now runs. As CPTO he led the creation and optimization of the global organization and infrastructure that made independence possible in the first place. When Boundless split from Pearson, someone had to construct the systems, the product roadmap, and the operating backbone of a standalone company. That someone was Richards.

A career that started at the help desk

The résumé is unusual for a modern chief executive. Richards did not zigzag between companies collecting titles. He spent roughly 23 years inside the Pearson family, and his first role was about as far from the boardroom as you can get: a support analyst at Penguin Books, the storied publishing house that sat within Pearson's orbit. From that entry-level technology seat he climbed through a string of technology and business leadership roles, driving digital transformation programs and helping build global platforms along the way.

That long tenure inside one organization is telling. It gave Richards a ground-level understanding of how the products actually work, how the operations hang together, and where the friction lives. By the time he reached the executive leadership team of Pearson Online Learning Services, he had overseen product, technology, and business operations functions - the full stack of running an education technology business, not just one slice of it.

His path into technology was not preordained either. Richards has said his fascination with computers took hold during high school in the 1990s, at a well-funded school that gave him early access to the machines. When he got to college he first pointed himself at marketing, enrolling at the University of Central Florida, before pivoting toward technology. He ultimately earned a bachelor's degree from Penn State University. The winding start is a reminder that the straight line is rarely the real one.

What he believes education is becoming

Ask Richards to describe the business and he frames it in terms of access rather than software. "At our core, we're in the business of enabling universities and other learning institutions to reach new audiences through high-quality online learning experiences," he told LEADERS Magazine. The phrase that matters there is "new audiences" - the learners who are working, remote, mid-career, or simply nowhere near a traditional lecture hall.

He also argues the definition of online education has outgrown the degree. "Online education has evolved beyond traditional program constructs," he said. "It's about career mobility, understanding that learning doesn't end at a point in time." It is a view that pushes Boundless Learning away from thinking of itself as a vendor of one-off programs and toward being a partner across a learner's whole working life. That thesis lines up neatly with the company's stated push into corporate and association markets, where the customer is often a professional topping up skills rather than an eighteen-year-old chasing a first degree.

How he leads

For a leader who came up through code and systems, Richards talks about people more than platforms. He puts emotional intelligence, open communication, and collaboration at the center of how he describes his job. "Leadership is about more than making decisions - it's about fostering a culture where people can do their best work," he has said. In interviews he returns repeatedly to listening: to employees, to learners, and to the university and corporate customers who decide whether Boundless Learning thrives.

That instinct toward continuity showed in how he handled the handoff. Rather than signal a dramatic reinvention on day one, Richards leaned into stability. "We are well positioned to build on our successful first year as a standalone company," he said when the promotion was announced, calling it "an honor and privilege to lead Boundless Learning and our incredible team." For a company still proving it can stand alone, a steady hand that already knows where the wiring runs is its own kind of statement.

The test ahead is straightforward to describe and hard to pull off. The online program management market is crowded and under pressure, university partnerships are being renegotiated across the industry, and every edtech firm is scrambling to figure out where automation and new technology fit. Richards is betting that a business built on personalization, run by someone who understands its machinery from the inside, can find room to grow. He has spent two decades earning the right to make that bet.