Abstract

To sustain workers’ employability in times of transforming economies, workers must continuously invest in their human capital. Consequently, over the past decades, politicians have increasingly promoted the idea of lifelong learning. In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is unclear how governmental restrictions are currently affecting the interest in training, how this will affect the interest in training in the future, and subsequently, how this will affect actual training participation. The goal of this study is to shed light on the impact of governmental restrictions on workers’ interest in continuous training-and online training in specific- against the background of changing number of Covid-19 infections in the first, second, and third wave of the Corona-pandemic in Germany. We exploit Google Trends data on searches for training-related keywords. The underlying idea is that these keywords reflect workers’ interest in training and indicate actual training participation. As these data are available for periods before and during different stages of the pandemic, we are able to document how the interest in training changed with the onset of and throughout the pandemic, applying an event-study approach.