Learners across the UAE in 2021 were particularly enthusiastic about courses that offer the business skills needed to thrive in the global economy, including negotiation, professional English-language competency, and an understanding of financial markets, a new study has revealed.

Coursera, an online learning platform, in its annual study of learner trends – based on the content choices of over 560,000 registered UAE learners, suggests that this trend reflects the UAE’s business skills proficiency rating, as the country ranked second globally in this domain in the 2021 Coursera Global Skills Report.

Top courses aimed at improving business skills taken by UAE learners in 2021 included:

● University of Pennsylvania’s English for Career Development
● University of Michigan’s Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills
● Yale University’s Financial Markets

However, the UAE’s top course this past year was Johns Hopkins University’s Covid-19 Contact Tracing, reflecting the need to mitigate the effects of the ongoing pandemic.

The 2021 study also found that UAE learners sought to equip themselves with the technological and data science skills that are in high demand in the modern, technology-centric economy. Ranked second last year was Google’s Foundations: Data, Data Everywhere, which forms part of Google’s Data Analytics professional certificate.

Foundations: Data, Data Everywhere was joined in the UAE top-ten by Stanford University’s Machine Learning which speaks to an increasing desire among UAE learners to adapt to a workplace increasingly defined by AI-driven automation. These trends also represent learners taking steps that will help to improve the UAE’s competitiveness in Coursera’s Data Science and Technology domains, for which the country ranked 71st and 72nd respectively in the report.

“2021’s learner trends suggest that the UAE is in a strong position to consolidate its world-leading status for business skills proficiency,” said Anthony Tattersall, vice-president of EMEA, Coursera. “It is also encouraging to see high uptake of data science and technology courses that prepare the country to reduce its skills gap in these domains, as illuminated by our Global Skills Report. This year, we look forward to working together to make online learning even more effective and equitable for the UAE’s learners by delivering new world-class content and tools.”

Designed to help learners of all backgrounds prepare for an entry-level digital job in a growing field, entry-level professional certificates don’t require a degree or prior technical experience. In response to the double disruption created by automation and the Covid-19 pandemic, Coursera has observed increasing emphasis on a credential that facilitates fast, flexible retraining, including in the UAE.

Also ranked among the UAE’s ten most popular courses was Google’s Foundations of Project Management, which contributes to the company’s project management professional certificate.

The top ten courses in the UAE in 2021 were:

2021 Rank	Course Name	Course Provider
1	Covid-19 Contact Tracing	Johns Hopkins University
2	Foundations: Data, Data Everywhere	Google
3	Machine Learning	Stanford University
4	English for Career Development	University of Pennsylvania
5	The Science of Well-Being	Yale University
6	Foundations of Project Management	Google
7	Learning How To Learn	Deep Teaching Solutions
8	Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills	University of Michigan
9	Design Thinking for Innovation	University of Virginia
10	Financial Markets	Yale University