Romania: Improved e-learning through the cloud

Economy in Romania is growing and many employees are eager to profit from this and promote their career by improving their skills. This is why Romania is one of the fastest growing markets for self-improvement training.

While employees have been enrolling for languages, marketing skills, programming or business science, the trainings have not been effective: a survey by Valoris Center SA, May 2011, showed that only up to 28% of the small and medium business representatives benefited from them.

The European Social Fund is beginning to invest four million euros in specialized online training for managers of small and medium enterprises. With partners such as Deutsche Telekom, they set up the “Online Business School” as a new and innovative training program with more than 100 offerings, tailored to the particular needs of these employees.

Based on Deutsche Telekom’s local high speed Internet access, this was done via an effective cloud solution, delivering these trainings ready for self-service – the participants could attend the courses where or whenever they found time. While the costs of this scalable cloud solution were low, their success was huge with 32.000 participants so far enrolling for “Sales”, “Communication with a difficult manager” and “Job Interviews” as most popular choices and “Entrepreneurship & Start-up – Start your own business.” as the favourite webinar selection.

The e-learning training offering of the “Online Business School” is just one milestone towards a cloud-enabled public administration infrastructure in Romania. Future projects will bundle local public services and enable citizens to access many more digitized public services online. Soon, Romanians may be able to file official documents such as tax declarations conveniently and securely via the Internet from their own homes.