The Tea Time Education Series 2024 kicked off on World Education Day, January 24, with the topic "ESD in vocational orientation and vocational training".
Iken Draeger from Wissenschaftsladen (WILA) Bonn e.V. presented WILA's involvement in the Green Working World Network. Together with other partners, he founded the network in 2017 to bring together sustainable companies, schools, associations, extracurricular education partners and other stakeholders who are committed to career guidance in the field of environmental and climate protection. The network aims to pool expertise and make career prospects in the green world of work visible and highlight training opportunities through information and targeted campaigning. The Green Working World Network currently has 150 members. Its web portal contains offers, materials and information on career guidance and securing skilled workers in the green world of work: https://gruene-arbeitswelt.de (opens in a new tab)
The portal also presents 16 occupational fields that can be assigned to the green world of work, with the professions to be found there and information on training opportunities. What makes these professions "green" are, on the one hand, the activities in the profession that are geared towards environmental and climate protection and accelerate the ecological transformation and, on the other hand, the associated competence requirements, the so-called green skills (= skills/knowledge/technologies/practices that are required for an ecologically sustainable economy).
With the establishment of four regional offices, the Green Working World Network is now strengthening its regional activities. The WILA Bonn is responsible for the West region and offers various support to establish structures in the regions that help to provide better orientation in the green world of work for young people choosing a career and for professionals who want to reorient themselves professionally. Publications can be found at https://gruene-arbeitswelt.de/publikationen (opens in a new tab)
Draeger also presented two dialog formats that WILA Bonn is currently developing and testing as part of the "Jobs for Future NRW" project. The formats are called "Future Talk" and "Future Activity". The formats can be used to organize two- to three-hour events with schools and sustainable companies - at the school or company or digitally if the journey is too far. The formats can be used by schools free of charge. Further information can be found at "Jobs for Future NRW ": https://www.jobsforfuture-nrw.de (opens in a new tab)
Gerald Fichtner, Managing Director of the IHK Bonn/Rhein-Sieg training company, presented the training center, a subsidiary of the IHK with around 3,500 participants per year, around 30 employees and 1,000 freelancers. He explained that of the total of 321 training occupations in Germany, around 250 dual training occupations fall within the remit of the IHKs, but that the IHK itself is not a nationwide "regulatory" institution. The basis for a training occupation is the Vocational Training Act and the creation of a nationally standardized and recognized training occupation is a very lengthy process in which the legislator, the social partners, the Federal-State Committee, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Education are involved. The Chamber of Industry and Commerce therefore cannot simply implement demands, e.g. to integrate more sustainability topics into the training occupations, quickly.
The topics of "environmental protection" and "health and safety at work" as sub-areas of vocational ESD had already been anchored since the end of the 1990s, but the structured implementation of ESD would, in his estimation, still take years.
Mr Fichtner reported on the funding project developed in cooperation with the Bonn/Rhine University of Applied Sciences: IHK certificate "Specialist training for sustainable development", which the IKK training center offered until 2021 and then withdrew from the program due to a lack of demand. It was probably too expensive for companies to give their employees several days off work for this further training.
A new funding project is starting this year: "Sustainable at work - future-oriented training" (NIB), with which the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) wants to strengthen sustainability-oriented vocational training.