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With the unification process in 1990, vocational education and training in East and West Germany were growing together as well. Now, after 25 years, BWP takes a look back and highlights the stages and challenges of the transformation process, starting with the common features of both systems and their differences. What were the opportunities for developing a unified German vocational education and training system in this period? Have these opportunities been seized, and which impulses for currently debated questions result from this historical review?
In view of the decreasing numbers of training graduates, the hiring process in companies providing training in East and West Germany is given closer attention in this paper. Although the chances of trainees being hired have improved overall, conspicuous differences are seen between East and West when some core company features are compared.
The search for security is indicative of a basic need that prevailed in Eastern Germany in the phase of system change and the subsequent economic transformation crisis. But the pursuit of security was and is traditionally widespread in Western Germany as well. Thus the ground was prepared for a social culture pattern recognised throughout Germany in which the traditions of the authoritarian welfare state of the GDR and the democratic social state of the Federal Republic were merged. The paper exemplifies how attitudes prevailing in East and West have converged in the course of 25 years.
Even though vocational education and training in the GDR functioned according to the state's fundamental principles of partisanship, planned economy, centralisation, etc., it was still compatible in its essentials with that in the Federal Republic. How else can the seemingly noiseless transition of a "socialist system of vocational education and training" to the West German one that started in 1990 be explained? After giving a historical overview of the VET system in the GDR and a comparison with that in the FRG, the paper makes it clear that there is still a lot of potential for VET research and policy, calling for this part of German vocational education and training history to be addressed.
The rapid process of transformation of initial vocational education and training in the context of German reunification – starting with the adoption of the Vocational Training Act by the GDR on 1 September 1990 – not only had a direct impact on vocational education and training practice in the former East Germany but, in retrospect, resulted in far-reaching changes in the structure of occupations. How these developments look in connection with the tertiarisation of the dual system of vocational education and training and how the implications differ for men and women in East and West Germany is examined in this paper.
The GDR had a well-developed system of initial vocational training, which sprang from the same roots as the dual system of education and training in the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, the economic problems in Eastern Germany and specific demographic trends led to considerable difficulties in the introduction of the dual system. These are recapitulated in the paper. At the same time the paper shows how a variety of tools and support measures have been used in an attempt to address these difficulties. Twenty-five years after reunification, new imbalances have emerged on the training place market, which are named at the end of the paper. Once again they require flexible responses.
Günter Albrecht; Renate Behrendt; Wolfgang Müller-Tamke
The adoption of the West’s dual system of vocational education and training by the new federal states confronted the training staff with new tasks and challenges. It was in August 1990 that the support for the qualification of vocational education and training staff began in East Germany. Up until 1992, the then Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBW) set aside approximately 50 million DM for that purpose. What was achieved through that programme? What role did it play in the transformation process? How did East and West Germans support this process? The paper follows up these questions and draws attention to insights and experiences in retrospect.
Vocational expert commissions were firmly established in the GDR vocational training system as institutions for the development of skilled worker occupations. Although they were considered meaningful bodies by many, efforts made ten years after German reunification to introduce them into the Alliance for Jobs under the designation of vocational expert groups met with a subdued response. The paper uses two examples to describe the resistance and difficulties and at the same time to underline the potentialities of such bodies for the reorganisation of occupations requiring initial and further training.
Given the profound structural changes that were taking place at the time, especially in the new federal states, the establishment of mechatronics technician as a training profession in the late 1990s was an enormous challenge. A mechatronics network was created with the "Regio-Competence-Training" education and training structure project to assist in implementing training and obtaining company training places. The necessity of the network and its creation and after-effects are described in the paper.
Inter-company vocational training centres make a significant contribution in many ways to the initial and continuing education and training of skilled workers. Using the example of the Dresden-based Elektrobildungs- und Technologiezentrum e. V. (Electrical Training and Technology Centre, EBZ), the paper sheds light on the establishment and expansion of an inter-company vocational training centre in the process of development after German reunification. In particular, reference is made to how changing conditions and new challenges favoured the step-by-step establishment of the EBZ both in the region and in nationwide networks, so that there was a gradual adaptation and expansion of educational opportunities. In conclusion, the paper outlines prospects for further networking at an international level.
In training their vocational education and training personnel, many countries want to learn from Germany. But the models that are crucial in German dual vocational training – academic training of vocational school teachers and continuing education of company specialists to become trainers – are often not suited to the conditions and requirements prevailing there. The "integrated teacher" approach could be of interest. Foreign students were trained as "teachers for vocational education" in this technical college course in the last years of the GDR. The programme is presented in this paper. It ends by discussing how it can stimulate today's vocational education and training cooperation.
About a quarter of all trainees in Germany are currently in non-academic training courses outside the dual system of vocational education and training. This training area is diverse and heterogeneous in terms of legal bases and in other ways. What are these training courses? Where are they offered? What are the characteristics of this training area? The paper gives an insight into the field of training that is pertinent to specialists in the area of health, education and social work and gives examples of selected characteristics and peculiarities as compared to training in the dual system.
The "Federal Law on the National Qualifications Framework", which as currently planned is to enter into force on 1 January 2016, provides the basis for the assignment of qualifications to one of eight levels of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). At the same time, it marks the end of a rather long development process with broad participation of the relevant stakeholder groups in which not only the structure of the NQF, the classification descriptors and the assignment process were discussed, but also the objectives and expectations associated with the NQF. The paper describes the NQF developments to date in the light of specific features of the Austrian education system and introduces a fan model for visualizing the equivalence of qualifications.