SACE EDUCATION: SACE’s Training HUB To Support Businesses And Professionals

For over 40 years, SACE, Italy’s Export Credit Agency, has been synonymous with export and internationalisation support for Italian businesses wishing to strengthen their competitiveness abroad.

In 2020, SACE’s scope was expanded and strengthened to support Italian businesses on the domestic market in both the emergency and recovery phases, playing a key role in the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza). However, the evolution of SACE’s mission went beyond the expansion of its operations.

Indeed, together with the insurance-financial products SACE makes available to companies to support their growth in Italy and abroad, the free training offer addressed to companies and professionals through its training hub SACE Education, which has become an increasingly important role reinforced with new contents and formats in line with the evolution of SACE’s role.

Therefore, the hub was strengthened with programs designed to meet the needs of SACE’s new operations: not only exports and internationalization, but also green and digital infrastructures. Academic training, delivered in collaboration with selected Italian universities, completes the picture of the offer.

These figures prompted SACE to take a further step in this direction by launching, in early 2021, SACE Education, an innovative and free training hub. The main aim of the new platform is to provide a varied, specialised and multi-channel experience, helping businesses to strengthen their management strategies, in addition to implementing more rigorous approaches and models of market knowledge and analysis and fostering a greater internal culture of sustainability and digitalisation.

Launched in 2018 with a focus on export and internationalization, SACE Education has involved almost 10,000 companies, providing over 200 hours of training in 2021 alone, more than 80 webinars and 8 training projects.

The main purpose of SACE Education is to offer a varied, specialized and multi-channel experience, supporting companies to rethink their business models, implementing approaches and models that are more rigorous to analyse and understand the markets, and fostering a greater internal culture on the subject of sustainability and digitalization.

In addition to meeting the real needs of businesses, SACE Education also targets professionals and young talents who wish to develop their management knowledge and skills in a global, sustainable and inclusive environment.

In order to provide an all-inclusive support, SACE’s training hub relies on three pillars:

• specialised courses on exports and internationalisation, the pillar of SACE’s value proposition;
• programmes supporting green, digital and infrastructure strategies to grow in Italy and abroad;
• certified academic training in collaboration with reputable universities and business schools.

Many activities have been developed by SACE Education from its launch to today.

Among the several innovative formats launched, there is Venti di impresa[1] – The new routes of made in Italy, a series of original podcasts, born from the collaboration between SACE Education and Radio24, the main radio channel specializing in economic and financial issues. In line with SACE’s mission, the podcasts explored issues related not only to exports -such as business etiquette and smart customs clearance-, but also the green and digital transition through the involvement of experts from the Italian institutional and business world.

In order to support the digital transition of Italian SMEs also in terms of e-commerce, SACE Education launched in 2021 Ripatire in Digitale[2], a series of webinars created in collaboration with Promos Italia and Assocamerestero, aiming at investigating the most promising digital markets for our export. Over 800 companies attended the first edition and, in 2022, the program is going to be proposed again in its second edition.

There are many training initiatives designed to support the post-pandemic recovery of our supply chains including the Industry Edu Labs, comparison and in-depth workshops aimed at companies sharing sectoral affinities, aimed at strengthening the company’s technical-specialist skills and activating new synergies of production chain. The first edition saw the involvement of companies from the following sectors: agri-food, chemical & pharmaceutical, green economy, fashion & furniture, automotive, construction/infrastructure.

The Women in Export project was undoubtedly a milestone for SACE Education as it represented the first Italian business community for women in the export sector, launched last December with the participation of the Italian Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family. The project aimed at strengthening the female managerial endowment of Italian companies through the development of technical-managerial skills in terms of corporate leadership and internationalization.

Women in Export is aimed at women owners and senior figures of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises, business consultants, public administration officials, and women representatives of the world of associations dealing with or interested in export and internationalisation. The fulcrum of the project is its community of almost 1000 members, based on a free digital platform where it is possible to access training events, live talks, moments of strategic networking, one-to-one meetings and peer education opportunities and mentoring. The first five meetings organized from January to March talked about female empowerment and PNRR, ecological transition and digitization from a gender perspective, gender equality and internationalization. Many institutional partners involved including the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Ministry of Ecological Transition, Invitalia, the European Commission, etc.

The training hub was an extremely dynamic tool, as shown by the prompt response to changes in the geopolitical scenario following the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Indeed, SACE has activated a crisis table to constantly and carefully monitor the situation, update and support Italian businesses exporting to the areas involved in the conflict and affected by the related effects. With this in mind, SACE Education has also acted promptly by organising a series of specific meetings in live streaming involving all the main players of the Country: from institutions to associations.

However, as already mentioned, SACE Education was also developed to support academic training. To this end, SACE Academy project was launched, in collaboration with some of Italy’s most prestigious universities and targeted at recent graduates and young professionals. SACE Academy is a gateway to highly specialised managerial training, combining the experience of the SACE universe with the best professionals of the academic world. By offering a wide range of training courses with different learning environments, SACE intends to help strengthen business skills and turn young participants into the promoters of a new way of doing business with a view to innovation, sustainability and resilience.

“SACE Education was created to respond to the complexities of the new economic context and effectively support SACE’s mission to help the Country and Italian companies – explained Mariangela Siciliano, Head of SACE Education – In line with the expansion of its mandate, SACE has strengthened its activity of supporting and accompanying companies, especially SMEs, to improve their international projection and growth capacity on the domestic market. In such a context, SACE Education is an extremely innovative initiative, multi-channel, and tailor-made not only for companies and professionals, but also for future generations who are called to meet current challenges, design a new way of doing business and guide Italy’s growth in the years to come ”.

[1]Transl.Winds of Enterpise

[2]Transl. Restarting digital