by Anthony Tattersall, Vice-President for EMEA, Coursera
Accelerating technological progress is creating extraordinary potential for urgently-needed economic growth. Recent analysis suggests that, by 2030, the cumulative additional GDP contribution that could be created by optimising adoption of new digital technologies could amount to €2.2 trillion across the European Union.
However, many Europeans do not possess the digital skills required to maximise the potential of these new technologies. The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) shows that 4 out of 10 adults and every third person who works in Europe lacks basic digital skills, while over 70% of businesses have said that the lack of staff with adequate digital skills is an obstacle to investment.
To drive the upskilling at scale that is imperative for business transformation, in the first half of 2022, more than 120 companies across EMEA launched, renewed or expanded their Coursera for Business relationships to provide employees with the critical skills needed to ensure continued competitiveness and nurture resilience in a challenging business environment. This includes 61 new customers including Siemens, Aker Solutions, Sanofi, and IKEA.
For Siemens, integrating Coursera into their platform-based learning ecosystem has offered learners the opportunity to pursue flexible, personalised professional development pathways, driven by the extensive range of content available on the Coursera platform. Access to courses on Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, and Data Analysis from industry leaders including Google, Meta, and IBM has enabled Coursera to become a major strategic partner in supporting Siemens with their digitalization, automation and innovation efforts.
Daniela Proust, VP and Global Head of Global Learning and Growth at Siemens, said: “At Siemens, we want to support our people in staying relevant in this permanently changing environment by building the capabilities of embracing change and continuously evolving functional and technical skills. In times where learning & development (L & D) can be a major lever to drive digital transformation, our goal was to establish a culture inspiring continuous learning and development and to provide high standard learning content with a depth in the field of tech and business. Coursera is a market leader in this field best known for great courses created by experts worldwide. Coursera is one of our strategic upskilling partners that complement our learning ecosystem very well.”
Coursera remains dedicated to facilitating a skills-first approach to upskilling and reskilling with Sanofi, actively supporting efforts to tap into the latest technologies, minds, and medical advances to rethink medicine and improve lives. Sanofi employees have already logged over 130,000 learning hours with Coursera, primarily focused on developing the essential business & data science skills required in today’s technology-driven pharmaceutical industry. Top courses undertaken by Sanofi learners include Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis (Macquarie University), Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time Management for Personal & Professional Productivity (University of California, Irvine, and Foundations: Data, Data Everywhere (Google). Sanofi has also utilised its partnership with Coursera to author their own Guided Projects, which also rank among the top courses undertaken by the company’s employee learners.
Mary Zedeck, Head of the Global Learning Center of Expertise at Sanofi, said: “Learning at Sanofi includes multiple facets of self-paced, cohort-based, social, and blended methodologies. Coursera has provided the Sanofi community with organised learning across a variety of content topics in the quest for acquiring skills needed for today and planning for those skills needed for tomorrow.”
Coursera for Business now provides over 3,500 companies across the globe with the content and tools necessary to connect role-based learning with role-based hiring and professional development, offering world-class content, hands-on learning, and the ability to track, measure, and benchmark skills through a single, unified platform.
Recent innovations – including LevelSets – are enabling employees to quickly determine their proficiency in key skills and identify key areas for skills development, while giving organizations greater visibility and insights into employee competencies and the scale of institutional skills gaps. Coursera Clips, which offers over 200,000 bite-sized videos and lessons from the world’s leading companies and universities, are enabling institutions to make in-demand skill development content more accessible to employees, allowing them to begin learning new skills in under 10 minutes. In addition, SkillSets are helping employees develop the competencies needed for specific jobs. These SkillSets are the building blocks for Coursera’s portfolio of Academies, which offer a packaged learning experience based on the depth of skill needed for specific roles across an organization.
By continuing to partner with businesses across the EMEA region to provide job-relevant training at speed and scale, we look forward to supporting a more equitable, skilled, resilient labour market.
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