by Daniel Breitinger (Education Policy & Public Affairs Officer, BITKOM e.V.)
from the handbook Digital Competence and Future Skills
Four minutes must be enough to become smarter and equip oneself for the challenges of the modern working world. Overall, people in Germany have only four minutes a day - 2.3 working days extrapolated over the year - available for vocational training. And this is happening at a time when lifelong learning has never been more important than today.
We are at the beginning of a new age of vocational training. At the moment, training and development are something special and closed in time. They are determined in annual meetings, are linked to product releases, often involve business travel and take place in blocks. Digitalization enables us to break up these formerly rigid concepts as well as formats and to think in new ways.
From a macroeconomic perspective, this chapter looks at the challenges and opportunities associated with new skill profiles and the way we train. It raises the questions of what requirements vocational training will have in the future, how companies and employees will deal with them and what framework conditions must prevail in order to maintain Germany's innovation and competitiveness in the future.
The handbook Digital Competence and Future Skills provides comprehensive insight into the future of competencies and learning and the transformation of business. For the first time, leading companies from a wide range of industries around the world provide concrete insights into their comprehensive approaches to transformation, competence management, culture change, and learning and development. In addition, leading scientists and institutions use the latest research findings to assess where we are today and what is to come in the future.