Italy: boom of online trainees

Even in 2021, the pandemic and the consequences it brought (including a general reduction in social events, changes in the labor market and the need for many to change jobs or relocate) radically changed the scenario of training in Italy. 

This is revealed by a study by Semrush, platform for online visibility management and SEO analysis of websites, which analyzed the traffic of the main online training portals, noting an average growth of 329% compared to 2019 data.

In first place among the sites of greatest increase is Domestika.org (+ 2,742%) with its offer of courses for creative minds. Also the Business School of Il Sole 24 ore improves by 853% and finally Coursera.org (+283% in April 2021), a platform that offers courses taught by professors from prestigious universities around the world. 

It is therefore mainly university courses that allow you to follow the theoretical part online while working and putting into practice what you have learned. But who are the users of the online education taken into consideration? In two cases out of three, they are under 35, digital natives. In particular, in 54% of cases, the largest age group is 25-34 years old, while less than the remaining 46% is made up of students between 18 and 24 years old.

Even if, as far as enrollment at physical universities is concerned, women continue to be more numerous (representing 65.7% of new enrollments in the last academic year, according to Censis data), in the online universe men seem to be more active, representing 54% of students. The platform with fewer female students? Udemy.com, where only 27% of those enrolled are women.

Growing supply and competition

Over the years, the eLearning industry has undergone several changes. Economics teaches us that the rarer a good is on the market, the more it has value: training (traditional or digital) also follows this rule. 

In the pre-digital era, when face-to-face training was the only source of learning available, having a course or a teacher available for a given subject (perhaps a niche one) was not so obvious and, in most cases, involved significant travel, making learning very expensive. In addition to the fact that ADSL connections did not support audio and video transmission, there was also a prejudice against online training whereby only in-person training was considered synonymous with quality. 

With the advent of fast internet and the digitization of training, the ability to attend any course, and see it when you want, was finally born.
Online training has spread, not only in terms of audience, but also in terms of content creators: the barriers to self-paced course creation have fallen and the market has seen many new "low cost" players, not to mention the spread of free training videos (formal or informal) on platforms like Youtube.

However, in order not to fall into deception and spend your time in the fruition of a course chosen on the basis of the lowest cost, which promises a content or a certification, but then gives in substance a training content of lower quality than promised or expected, it is always better to rely on providers who have been on the market for a long time, certified training specialists. 

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator