Anthony Tattersall, Vice President of EMEA at Coursera
With the pace of technology adoption accelerating, nearly 80% of business leaders believe building the right capabilities will be important to an organization’s long-term growth. We are seeing strong evidence of this among enterprises in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), as enterprises rapidly double down on skill development to stay ahead in the digital economy.
In the second half of 2021, 69 new businesses across EMEA adopted Coursera for Business and 90 companies renewed or expanded their Coursera for Business partnership. These include companies from a range of industries such as retail, banking, media and consultancy, with household names such as Trivago, Orange, Siemens, and Bosch.
“Digital technologies are transforming our industry at an ever-faster pace. Coursera is helping us rapidly build critical digital skills that our employees can apply in their daily work to help our business evolve”, said Steve Jarett, Senior Vice President, Data and AI at Orange. “Being able to track, measure, and benchmark skill development, internally as well as against industry peers, gives us the insights we need to adapt and guide our transformation.”
“Our partnership with Coursera will help us take our skill development efforts to the next level through role-based learning, effectively matching learners’ roles to the exact skills and courses they need to succeed in their jobs”, said Stefania Stoian, Talent Development & Engagement lead at Trivago. “Coursera’s expansive catalog will give our employees access to high-quality content, for the required depth and breadth of learning we need to address existing skill gaps.”
For many companies, skill development continues to be an important engagement and retention strategy. To help employees grow in their existing roles, our new LevelSets offering allows employees to quickly determine their proficiency in key skills and identify areas to focus on moving forward. By providing learners with a clear development path based on their specific goals and existing proficiency levels, they are more motivated and better equipped to build job-relevant skills fast and effectively.
Coursera for Business now provides over 3,100 companies across the globe with role-based skills development featuring world-class content, hands-on learning, and the ability to track, measure, and benchmark skills through a single, unified platform. In addition to LevelSets, recent platform innovations such as SkillSets are helping employees develop skills for specific jobs. These SkillSets are the building blocks for our portfolio of Academies. Using underlying skills data, these Academies – including Leadership Academy, Marketing Academy, and Tech Academy – offer a packaged learning experience based on the depth of skill needed for specific roles across an organization.
For example, Leadership Academy enables employees to build essential human skills such as change management, emotional intelligence, innovation, and resilience, while Tech Academy offers training for both these human skills, and in-demand technical skills – from Python and Javascript to GCP, AWS, and Tensorflow.
As momentum around our Coursera for Business offering grows throughout EMEA, several important trends have emerged. Coursera for Business learners in the region are building in-demand skills in technology and data science.Top courses for employees during the second half of 2021 include Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) from the University of Michigan, What is Data Science from IBM, and AI for everyone by Deeplearning.ai.
Companies are also emphasizing the development of human skills to build high-performing teams capable of adapting through change. Top enrolled courses by employees in EMEA included Learning How to Learn from Deep Teaching Solutions, Work Smarter, Not Harder from University of California, Irvine, and The Science of Wellbeing from Yale.
Technological change is outpacing human adaptability. To adjust, we need to engage in smarter learning, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. We are therefore thrilled to be partnering with leading companies in the region, helping them equip their teams with the skills to innovate faster and accelerate business transformation, for long-term growth and success.