Through Digitalization to a Further Education Country - Perspectives of Europe's Leading Digital Association Bitkom

by Daniel Breitinger (Education Policy & Public Affairs Officer, BITKOM e.V.)
from the handbook Digital Competence and Future Skills
Four minutes must be enough to become smarter and equip oneself for the challenges of the modern working world. Overall, people in Germany have only four minutes a day - 2.3 working days extrapolated over the year - available for vocational training. And this is happening at a time when lifelong learning has never been more important than today.
We are at the beginning of a new age of vocational training. At the moment, training and development are something special and closed in time. They are determined in annual meetings, are linked to product releases, often involve business travel and take place in blocks. Digitalization enables us to break up these formerly rigid concepts as well as formats and to think in new ways.
From a macroeconomic perspective, this chapter looks at the challenges and opportunities associated with new skill profiles and the way we train. It raises the questions of what requirements vocational training will have in the future, how companies and employees will deal with them and what framework conditions must prevail in order to maintain Germany's innovation and competitiveness in the future.
The handbook Digital Competence and Future Skills provides comprehensive insight into the future of competencies and learning and the transformation of business. For the first time, leading companies from a wide range of industries around the world provide concrete insights into their comprehensive approaches to transformation, competence management, culture change, and learning and development. In addition, leading scientists and institutions use the latest research findings to assess where we are today and what is to come in the future.
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Daniel Breitinger
is consultant in the Public Affairs team of Bitkom, Europe's largest digital association. Founded 1999 in Berlin, Bitkom represents more than 2,000 companies of the digital economy. The membership spans more than 1,000 SMEs, over 500 startups and virtually all global players. At Bitkom, Daniel is responsible for education policy issues such as the teaching of digital skills and the impact of digitalization on apprenticeships, higher education and continuing vocational training.
He also deals with issues such as how we can address the shortage of IT specialists and how we can strengthen women in the digital industry. Daniel successfully initiated and accompanied pivotal studies and reports on digital education in Germany and put together a series of requirements for change for German politics.
He studied European Studies and Political Science in Passau, Pavia and Berlin. During his studies, Daniel worked in the office of Member of the German Bundestag, was an Intern at the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Sydney, Australia, and worked at the Representation of the Free State of Bavaria to the Czech Republic in Prague. Daniel worked for number of private sector companies including Volkswagen Group in Berlin and Brussels before joining Bitkom in March 2021. Furthermore, he is the director of the Young European Federalists Berlin-Brandenburg e. V., a pro-European youth association.
Publishing Editor: Dr. Philipp Ramin
Dr. Philipp Ramin is a leading expert on digital transformation and future skills. With his company the Innovation Center for Industry 4.0 in Regensburg, Germany, which he founded whilst completing his Ph.D. on the topic of discontinuous innovation and digital business models, he trains more than 200,000 employees in 9 languages for leading companies from a wide range of industrial, business and financial sectors in more than 14 countries worldwide and has prepared a number of internationally recognized studies, for example on digitalization, artificial intelligence, digital competence. The Innovation Center for Industry 4.0 team, which was also instrumental in realizing this book, develops individual qualification solutions in the area of digitalization and Industry 4.0 for leading companies worldwide, including complete continuing education curricula and learning strategies as well as AR/VR solutions or complete digital online learning systems and competence management programs.
In 2022, together with one of his clients in the automotive sector, Philipp Ramin's company was awarded the recognized 'Project of the Year' eLearning Award for Instructional Design by Germany's leading publisher in this field, elearning Journal for a state-of-the art digital competence upskilling program with high acceptance, artificial intelligence supported gamification elements and proven and measured acceleration of the transformation process.