This report updates similar market analyses published by Learning Light in 2007 and 2009 – although the 2013/14 report is the first one to study the Chinese market.

Learning Light regularly conducts a great deal of international intelligence gathering and carries out specific research and market analysis relating to the eLearning and corporate online-learning markets for clients. These include organisations seeking investment or specific advice about this market; investors and potential investors; universities and other educational bodies; as well as national and international bodies including government departments. Learning Light has fed this data into its forecasting model – which, among other things, makes use of Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS) software – to arrive at its published figures.

The UK online-learning-technologies market, which is currently worth over £560m a year, is still the largest single online-learning-technologies market in Europe. However, in the wake of strong market growth by France, whose online-learning-technologies market has been growing at about twice the rate of the UK’s over the last four years or so, it is now being hard pressed to hang on to its position as "number one" in Europe.

At the other end of the scale, some European countries, notably Greece and Ireland, have seen their online-learning-technologies markets shrink in real terms between 2009/10 and 2012/13. Slovakia and Italy have experienced the largest percentage increases in their national markets over that period.

Learning Light director, David Patterson, commented, "This Industry Report provides a thorough assessment of the UK’s corporate eLearning sector, identifying and analysing the key issues and trends that affect the corporate online-learning industry. And thanks to our previous Industry Reports, there are now comparable figures for this sector from 2007 and 2010 to go with the current figures from 2013.

"There are also comparable figures, now, for countries in Europe from 2010 to 2013. And for the first time, the new report assesses the size and scope of the Chinese market for online-learning technologies. As such, these series of Learning Light Reports make essential reading for all eLearning market analysts and commentators, as well as would-be successful entrepreneurs and operators in this sector."

The final section of this new report looks even further afield than Europe: For the first time it examines the Chinese corporate online-learning-technologies (eLearning) market. This is significant because the Chinese economy is widely thought to be exerting an increasing influence over that of the rest of the world.

"The growing use of eLearning in China is being fed both by an increasing demand for knowledge management within companies and by the increased popularity of rapid authoring tools," said David. "These tools are enabling companies to not only gather and then harness internal – previously siloed - knowledge and skills but also to then develop their own content based on these skills and knowledge.

"Then, again, in China, state-owned enterprises are obliged, by law, to spend 2.5% of their employees’ salary bill on training," he added. "Moreover, it’s not uncommon for large private sector and state-owned enterprises to recruit 10,000 new employees a year.

"All of this, along with other information contained in the Learning Light report, suggests that there’s a large and growing market for learning as well as available budgets to provide it."