BIBB President Esser: “The Leando Portal provides crucial momentum for the training system!”

The new 2024/2025 training year officially begins on 1 August. The President of the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Friedrich Hubert Esser, marked the occasion by stressing the performance spectrum the “Leando” Portal is able to deliver and stated:

“The Leando Portal was set up by BIBB last year with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in order to provide support to training and examination staff. The main action lines of the portal are ‘Information – Networking – Qualification’. All provision relating to the different learning venues in the dual system – the company, the vocational school and the inter-company training centres – is thus presented to training and examination staff in an efficient, cross-cutting and practice-oriented way. The urgently required further development of vocational education and training, and the economic, technological and societal shift being necessitated by the transformation will not succeed in Germany without the indefatigable commitment of our trainers and examiners. However, it is also our remit and responsibility to provide stakeholders with results- and practice-oriented support in this important task. Leando will allow us to continue to live up to this responsibility in future.”

Both company-based trainers and teachers at vocational schools make an indispensable contribution to the quality and attractiveness of vocational education and training. They train young people to become qualified skilled workers. They use everyday work as a vehicle to demonstrate the modernity, diversity and attractiveness of VET and prepare their trainees for examinations in an appropriate and professional manner.

Around 625,000 persons are registered as trainers with chambers in Germany. A considerable proportion of these work as volunteer examiners. Extrapolations undertaken by BIBB indicate that around three million persons are deployed at companies as skilled workers providing training. Most company-based training services are provided by part-time training staff. These workers deliver training alongside or in addition to their actual work duties. Just under 30 percent of trainers are managers. Around 65 percent form part of the group of skilled workers providing training. Only just under two percent of training staff are employed as full-time trainers with the sole remit of delivering training tasks. Training staff invested an average of 18.2 hours per week in each trainee. This figure is significantly higher in companies in the smallest size category than at major companies (21 hours as opposed to twelve hours). There are also sector-related differences. Support time in the craft trades is, for example, approximately 20 hours. The corresponding figure for the public sector is about 12 hours.

Further information on support for training and examination staff is available at www.leando.de and in the BIBB study “Struktur und Aufwand des betrieblichen Ausbildungspersonals – Empirische Analysen auf Basis der BIBB-Kosten-Nutzen-Erhebungen” [“Structure and expense of company-based training staff – empirical analyses on the basis of BIBB costs and benefits surveys”], which may be found at https://lit.bibb.de/vufind/Record/DS-782659.

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