THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF LECTERA.COM:  YOUNG COMPANY, BIG RESULTS

Within the first year of its operation in the market, Lectera.com has been included in the list of top 100 Russian and/or CIS EdTech startups by HolonIQ and global online conference platform EdCrunch. As for the platform's CEO, Mila Semeshkina has been voted one of the top 10 EdTech startup founders by the international EdTech Awards, while Lectera.com itself has become the winner of 2021 EdTech Breakthrough Awards as the best ongoing education solution.

According to Mila Semeshkina, the founder and CEO of Lectera.com, 'Receiving prestigious awards is a great honour for us, as it serves as yet another reminder of the fact that what we are doing is important to people. Apart from the support of its regular users, our educational platform seems to be very popular with the entire international market as well; these are absolutely fantastic results, especially for a platform that was only launched a year ago. All the awards that we have managed to win within that time are very important to us, giving my team and me endless motivation to move forward, creating new things and improving our courses to the best degree possible'.

Originally, Lectera.com was released as a beta-version platform in order to ensure that all necessary improvements were implemented before the official release. In May 2021, the testing phase was finally over, with the official version of the platform incorporating customers' feedback as well as all changes made during the beta testing. Within the first year after its release, Lectera.com has achieved great results in terms of improving its overall online performance and expanding the range of courses offered within the platform by introducing some additional programmes, such as Lectera Teens as well as Lectera Corp. targeted specifically at the company's corporate clients. To improve user experience even further, iOS and Android applications have been launched as well, offering Lectera courses to all customers no matter the operating system of their choice.

Since its launch one year ago, Lectera.com has attracted more than 100,000 customers from 50 countries around the world, while also gaining the course completion rate of 86%. Nowadays, the platform offers 100 educational courses in 10 different subject areas, including such in-demand fields as digital era careers, marketing, soft skills, traffic and female leadership.

Lectera.com mainly focuses on international markets, including CIS countries, Europe, USA, Latin America, Africa, and India. Offering courses in five different languages, the platform has been localized into Russian, English, German, Spanish, and recently Hindi. For those willing to improve their foreign language skills, it is now possible to change language preference at any moment throughout the course.

According to Mila Semeshkina, 'Lectera's Indian customers have always been of paramount importance to us; this is exactly why we chose Hindi as the fifth official language for our courses. With India showing great potential in terms of its population, we are hoping to expand our customer base even further in the future. Even today, Lectera's Indian users make up about 7% of our entire client base'.

Eventually, the company is also aiming to get an official release in the USA, as well as to establish some long-term partnerships with various technology companies. As for the range of courses offered within the platform, it is going to get more extensive as time goes on, too; for instance, by the end of 2021 Lectera is planning to have as many as 250 courses available, most of which are going to focus on career development and female leadership. Apart from the new courses, the team is also working on developing new programmes, such as Intensive Career Development Programme, Master a Career in a Month, Lectera Insights and some others, which are expected to be introduced in the near future.

'I'm certain that for Lectera the upcoming year is going to be even more exciting and productive. At this moment, our main goal is to increase our client base to 1,000,000 people, eventually becoming the next unicorn company of the EdTech business. We realise, of course, that these goals will require a lot of hard work on our side; still, we are convinced that after a challenging 2020, there is absolutely nothing we cannot achieve', Mila Semeshkina shared.