“We need a more imaginative dialogue between research, policy making and practice”

Continuing training is considered to offer a large degree of potential with regard to getting people up to speed for the digital shift. But which general conditions are conducive in terms of achieving this? In June 2019, a cross-departmental alliance of the Federal Government and federal states joined forces with employer and employee organisations to set out its ideas in the National Continuing Training Strategy. The aims are to pool the continuing training programmes of the Federal Government and federal states, to align these in a requirements-oriented way and to establish a new continuing training culture. With the help of Professor Josef Schrader, a Board Member and the Research Director of the Deutsches Institut für Erwachsenenbildung [German Institute for Adult Education] in Bonn, we take a look at the continuing training landscape and ask what kind of impetuses the strategy paper may generate and where there is a further need for action and research.