The improvement of vocational education and training is given a high political priority in the USA. German enterprises that offer training courses oriented on the German system together with US educational establishments are highly appreciated by the US administration.
Against that background the President of the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Friedrich Hubert Esser, was invited to discuss the dual system of vocational education and training at a high-level conference in the Aspen Institute in Washington D.C. and make suggestions about which aspects could be transferable to the American economy.
"In the USA, the manufacturing industry in particular is greatly interested in company-integrated, customer-oriented vocational education and training following the German model. The conference provided an excellent platform for discussing these approaches and possible solutions with German and American representatives from the spheres of politics and business", Esser stressed following his talks in Washington.
Esser there met with, among others, the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Dr Rebecca M. Blank, the German ambassador in Washington, Dr Peter Ammon, and Professor Dietmar Harnoff, the chairperson of the Expert Commission on Research and Innovation convened by the Federal government. This is confirmation, said Esser, that the dual system is becoming more and more of an export hit.
Esser said, "Our goal in Germany is an integrated education system in which vocational and university education are on an equal footing and permeably interlinked. People in the USA were greatly interested to see that in our country vocational education and training, just like academic training, equally opens the way to the highest skill levels and is of the greatest importance for ensuring the availability of skilled labour."
Since there is no institutionalised training system in the USA and well-trained specialists are in short supply, the US Administration wants to promote greater cooperation between companies and community colleges. The commitment of German enterprises such as Siemens, Bosch and VW, which have started offering vocational training in theory and practice in the USA according to the dual system principle, was even mentioned in President Obama's State of the Nation address at the beginning of the year.
The fact that the youth unemployment rate of over 16 per cent in the USA is more than double that in Germany, where it is just short of 8 per cent, is another reason for US interest in changing the vocational training system there.
The BIBB has been maintaining cooperation with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) since 2003, and that cooperation is to be extended. It has resulted in cooperation initiatives with the participation of German institutions like the Vocational Promotion Centre for the Construction Industry North Rhine-Westphalia (Berufsförderungswerk der Bauindustrie NRW), the DEKRA Academy, the Siemens Technik Akademie and the Institute of Technology and Education of the University of Bremen.
The "Global Automotive Education Network" (GATEN) initiative of the DEKRA Academy and the Kentucky Center for Excellence in Automotive Manufacturing & Workforce Education (AMTEC) and the "SmartGrid and Electric Mobility" project of the Siemens Technik Akademie and the Macomb Community College have been particularly successful owing to the very close exchange between the project partners.
Because of the high level of attractiveness of the German vocational education and training system the consultative services of the BIBB have been increasingly in demand abroad for several years. At the present time the BIBB maintains about 30 cooperation agreements with institutions and establishments all over the world for the purpose of supporting reforms in the vocational education and training systems there.
In Asia, for example, the BIBB is active on site in China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Viet Nam.