digital certification courses are designed based on industryspecific requirements the course providers are emphasising on focused topics and skills fresh graduates and seasoned employees in tier ii and tier iii cities are enrolling in the short term digital certification courses offered by various edtech and heis instead of rushing to a bigger city for higher studies these courses are beneficial for those eying career advancement or a salary boostreasons for popularity lockdown and the workfromhome option gave employees a chance to redefine their career goals several of them enrolled in courses that were in demand at their workplace or the job market shifting to remote work has paved way for online learning which in turn has led to a level playing field for students living in nonmetros to enrol for a foundational course in digital skills raghav gupta managing director india and apac coursera says certification courses are designed for even learners who have no prior industry experience further these can be completed on average in 6 to 8 months 310 hours per week fully in online mode validating the reasons with data to substantiate that such courses are strong educational trend and is expected to boom in the coming years gupta says last year we saw a 98 rise in enrolments and we expect this trend to continue several entrylevel certification courses are popular as 135000 for the google data analytics course as many as 50000 students were enrolled on google project management and google ux design in each course whereas for google it support and ibm data science courses the enrolment was 38000 and 16000 respectively soon a high demand increased reliance on technology among wfh employees created a demand for technical and cybersecurity certifications the need to excel in career among tier1 2 cities got a realisation which resulted in a steep rise in enrolments sharing insight into the sudden spike for certifications r v raghu isaca ambassador in india says adoption of new and emerging technologies by enterprises has surfaced the need for understanding the risks of using these technologies these two reasons are strong enough for driving enrolments with the demandsupply gap for talent and the certainty of largescale recruitment 42 of indian companies have understaffed cybersecurity teams due to unsatisfactorily cybersecurity skills among candidates approximately 60 have unfilled positions with 62 mentioning that it takes them three to six months to find a qualified candidate adds raghu talking about healthy job prospects after certification course raghav gupta md coursera says indias fastgrowing digital economy is expected to serve a population of over 15 billion internet users by 2040 this will help budding digital practitioners in providing abundant opportunities to be employable certifications and careers in india certification courses namely google data analytics google project management google ux design google it support ibm data science have registered impressive enrolments these prepare learners to be picked up to work for salary hike and promotion these indemand careers are data analyst ux designer application developer and social