Abstract:Objectives: To analyse motivation and preferences of pharmacists who participate in CE (continuing education) to develop suitable lifelong learning programmes for pharmacists. Methods: An online questionnaire, which explored the motivation and preferences of the pharmacists to lifelong learning, was sent to all members of the Royal Dutch Pharmaceutical Society (4321) in the Netherlands. The data were analysed using a non-hierarchical clustering technique. Key findings: Two clusters of pharmacists were discovered. Cluster A pharmacists (n = 474) were more motivated by credit points (63.5% vs. 47.2%), personal interest (84.1% vs. 56.3%), updating knowledge (73.8% vs. 56.8%) and topicality of CE courses (47.7% vs. 26.1%). Cluster B pharmacists (n = 199) were predominantly motivated by the aspect "duty as a care-giver" (97.0% vs. 0 % in cluster A). Pharmacists who belonged to cluster A tended to be women (60.5%), often worked part-time (29.3%) and mostly preferred lectures (71.1%). Cluster B pharmacists consisted of statistically significantly more male pharmacists (52.8%, p = 0.001), worked more full time (77.4%, p = 0.009) and mostly preferred blended learning (62.3%, p = 0.047). Conclusions: These results suggest the use of different education formats for different kinds of pharmacists to participate in CE activities.