In 2020, Ashley Andersen Zantop embarked on her journey with Cambium Learning Group — one of the nation’s leaders in advancing K-12 education through intuitive, award-winning technology solutions. Stepping into a new role during a pandemic brought unique challenges, but her leadership, strengths and the company’s flexibility and employee-centric mindset made it a welcoming process. In fact, she first joined the company as COO, and starting her new role during pandemic conditions helped her and other leaders in the organization think in new ways about onboarding and meaningful employee and customer connection in a remote work environment.
Now, as CEO of Cambium, Andersen Zantop is committed to cultivating and upholding the pillars that define the workplace at Cambium, and today, Cambium has a reputation among its employees for its welcoming environment, its flexibility (including its progressive shift to a Remote First workplace), and its stance on allyship.
When Andersen Zantop talks about what motivates her, she talks about Cambium’s purpose “to help every teacher and every student feel seen, valued and supported,” and about how important it is to that work to “live that purpose internally, striving to help every employee feel seen, valued and supported.”
Coming from a family of entrepreneurs and educators, Andersen Zantop brings a diverse array of skills into her role as the CEO of Cambium. She developed these skills through a successful and nuanced career, first as a teacher and collegiate coach and then by working in product, marketing, sales, business development and managing companies in executive-level leadership positions for more than two decades.
Closing the Gender Gap in EdTech
Speaking of the outpouring of support and celebration she received when she accepted the role of CEO of Cambium, Andersen Zantop recalls the response to the announcement as a “truly humbling experience.” The reaction from people from across the industry to a woman taking the helm at one of the largest K-12 education technology companies “meant a great deal to me, personally, but it was also a reminder and a clear signal that significantly more work needs to be done.”
She adds, “Companies in education technology, or EdTech, have a cognitive dissonance of two identities: we have an education identity, and we have a technology identity. We have a blended identity, and I [think that impacts how we look at] spaces as employers and as educators.”
Andersen Zantop compares the demographics in the education field and the tech field: “75% of public school teachers are women and 54% are principals. In technology, we know the field is striving to become a workforce that includes more women. And yet, when you look at leadership roles at the top of both education and technology employers, the results are very similar… there are very few women in those top leadership positions.”
Last year, HolonIQ reported that just 13% of edtech CEOs and leaders are women. While Andersen Zantop is proud of Cambium’s progress, it’s a sobering reminder that the playing field is unbalanced.
“We’ve got both examples, education and technology, starting from very different places in terms of women as a percentage of the workforce. And yet the outcome is essentially the same when you start to get to leadership positions.”
Andersen Zantop is seeking to address this imbalance in leadership. She discusses what makes the culture of Cambium Learning Group unique and how she and the Cambium leadership team have looked at equity of opportunity in the last two years.
“We started with the fundamentals,” Andersen Zantop says. “‘What are the things that limit women’s full participation in the workforce in general? Everything from benefits and supports like parental and caregiver leave — not only for women but for men, too—women can remain in and return to careers when both they and their partners have equitable access to family leave.”
Andersen Zantop says in addition to foundational policy work to support women and historically marginalized communities in the workforce, it’s also fundamental to commit to developing active mentorship and allyship. “That’s both a structural responsibility of employers [and] an individual responsibility of people in all levels of leadership positions — and that requires… being intentional.”
Advice for the Next Generation of Leaders
Her advice for people seeking to lead a team or start a company is similar regardless of gender identity, but it can take on a different meaning or context depending on the identity groups each person is associated with.
“An implementation can be very different depending on what identities or what communities the person asking the question represents,” Andersen Zantop says. She groups her recommendations “under three big principles. The first thing I tell people is that if you want to be a successful leader in education or EdTech, you have to bring tenacity and grit with you. It’s the same thing we tell students.” She adds, “In any high-complexity, multi-stakeholder environment, you have to keep trying and reaching. When things don’t work, you have to try again.”
Her second piece of advice is to tune into your empathy. “I don’t mean empathy to be confused with kindness, although kindness can often follow empathy when empathy is real,” she says.
“What I mean is the ability to put yourself in your stakeholders’ position, to think about things through their points of view and their perspectives. It’s about listening, and really developing a full and meaningful understanding of someone else’s situation. This will help you solve for the right variables. You’ll understand the actual problem or challenge you are facing—not the one you assume you’re facing.”
Andersen Zantop’s final point of advice for the next generation of the EdTech workforce and leaders is to embrace and display allyship. “I think it’s one of the most important things any striving leader or developing professional can do, particularly women and people representing historically marginalized groups, to build a foundation of success,” she says.
“For yourself personally, for any teams you might become responsible for, you have to develop a strong network of allies. I think it is critically important to develop a meaningful ally who really has your best interests at heart and is really committed to helping overcome the challenges you face and seize the opportunities in front of you.”
Andersen Zantop says the best way to create such allies is to first become one for someone else.
“If your goal is to know a bunch of people, that’s not allyship. I call that networking. But if you really want to succeed — and you need the help of others to succeed — you have to help others succeed,” she says. “I think that’s fundamental.”
Serving Cambium’s Customers
Ultimately, Andersen Zantop’s primary commitment as the CEO of Cambium is not only to empower positive change within the EdTech industry but to empower the teachers, students and families the company serves.
“We serve more than 20 million students now, and a majority of students now have access to at least one device as an opportunity for learning. That’s what we want to see for a technology company, right? That’s an important change, and we’ve seen acceleration there,” Andersen Zantop says, commenting on the increasing number of learning devices and computers available to more students nationwide.
She adds, “We are also seeing an acceleration of investment relative to equity, to have access to things like increasing broadband internet and infrastructure investments that develop and enhance the type of access which is critical to education. We’ve also seen a huge number of educators begin to embrace digital instruction — which is really exciting for an education technology company.”
Speaking of her outlook on the EdTech industry and academic outcomes for K-12 students post-pandemic, Andersen Zantop says that while the acceleration of tech and broadband access among schools and families is exciting, “on the other hand, we have to be mindful and laser-focused on the fact that the pandemic and the response to it disproportionately impacted students from historically marginalized communities in the United States and around the world.”
She is ever mindful of the current educational opportunity gap: “[This gap] is even wider in many communities across the country than it was before the pandemic, and we know that academic outcomes have been significantly impacted.”
With a thoughtful and empathetic CEO such as Andersen Zantop at the helm, Cambium Learning Group is committed to taking action to shrink this opportunity gap, accelerate learning and help communities across the United States gain access to the tools they need to receive a high-quality education in a post-pandemic world.