Benefit from our unique insight into courses actually consumed by organisational learners in 2020

As an eLearning content aggregator with over 2,000 business course titles and with a distribution network of over 30 resellers across the globe, we are in a good position to analyse the top-performing eLearning courses within a wide-ranging business community.

We’ve collated course enrolment data from a carefully selected range of our client LMS instances (to minimise any biases in the data) to produce an aggregated analysis of course consumption over the year encompassing over 80,000 learner enrolments.

COVID-19 has meant that 2020 has been an unusual and unique year for just about every type of organisation that we support, and we thought it would be interesting to see how this has translated into the actual consumption of eLearning content by learners. This analysis is based on course enrolments that were actually used by learners as opposed to analysing the content that was purchased by organisations. That is to say that the research is learner-centric as opposed to being organisation or purchase-centric. Where possible, we’ve excluded any data sets that would bias the results because of the nature of the client relationship; for example, we have excluded data from LMS instances utilised by a publisher partner using our licensing system to control the use of their own courses within their own clients.

We’ve analysed the data in several ways:

  • Subject Domain.These are broad topics such as Health & Safety or Business Skills. This provides you with a good understanding of the main subject areas where both organisations and learners are investing time to develop using eLearning.
  • Publisher. This provides you with some insight into the top publishers for each subject area.
  • Course Title. This drills down to give you the top twenty studied courses in each of the main Subject Areas.

In this article, we will focus on the first of these analyses, the Subject Domain analysis.

What would predict to be top of the high-level subject domains in our catalogue. Would you think Health & Safety or Compliance, because of the mandated and often legislated nature of these subjects? Or perhaps, Desktop IT skills, because these courses have long been a mainstay for eLearning?

Well, you would have been wrong, wrong, and wrong in 2020! Business Skills more than pipped all these subject domains to the post in being the top studied domain accounting for over 31% of the total student enrolments.

Health & Safety was certainly a close second, but Compliance and Desktop IT were both way down the pecking order picking up only just over 5% of total enrolments each.

In our definition, Business Skills is a high-level category covering a pretty wide range of sub-domains and there is merit in drilling down into a little more detail in this subject domain.

Communication Skills account for 38% of the total and is evidence of the increasing importance that organisations and individuals are placing on developing appropriate communication skills for the changing nature of the modern workplace. Second on this list is Leadership and Management (25%) and this is a reflection on the need for organisations to continue to develop and grow these skills within their existing workforce, whom already know the organisation well, rather than recruiting for these skills externally.

If this has been good food for thought in terms of how you want to direct your learning & development efforts for the coming year, why not research our comprehensive multi-publisher catalogue offering a huge range of courses on all these subjects here to find the courses you need to support your organisation in 2021 and beyond?

Also do remember, that we can deliver any of their courses through your internal LMS, or we can provide you with a dedicated and branded version of our Course-Source LMS, if preferred.