Digitalisation in Dual Vocational Training: Progress to Date and Companies’ Ongoing Need for Modernisation and Support

It examines which measures companies are already implementing, where they need to change and where they need support – be it with internal processes, external courses, the framework conditions provided by education policy or the vocational schools, the firms’ partners in Germany’s dual training system.

What is clear is that digitalisation must be integrated even more closely into training courses. Of the businesses providing vocational training nearly a third, most of them small, have not yet addressed the issue of digitalisation in their training. Where they are most frequently active is in exploiting the ideas and suggestions of their trainees, the further training of their own trainers and in adjusting the content of their training courses. Companies’ overall degree of satisfaction with vocational schools is quite sobering, the item most positively rated being the willingness of vocational school teachers to cooperate with in-house trainers. Firms are currently expressing a primary need for support in creating additional and elective qualifications for trainees in order to better exploit the potential of digitalisation in vocational training.