Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB)

CVTS 2 - Supplementary Survey

Nationale Ergänzungserhebung zur zweiten europäischen Weiterbildungserhebung (CVTS-II Zusatzerhebung)

The survey supplementing the Second European Continuing Vocational Training Survey was conducted by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training with the financial support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research between November 2000 and February 2001 as a telephone survey of 474 enterprises providing continuing training that had already taken part in the European survey.
The themes of the supplementary survey were the effects of globalisation and structural transformation on company recruitment and qualification strategies, the attitude of the enterprises towards lifelong learning, a description of the content of continuing education and training offers beyond the courses and seminars, the reaction of the enterprises to educational policy proposals that greater emphasis be placed on individual responsibility of the training participants for their qualification, questions of costs and funding of in-company continuing education and training from the point of view of the enterprises and questions of greater integration of the jobless in in-company qualification processes.  

The main results of the supplementary survey are:

• The principal type of reaction by enterprises when affected by the consequences of globalisation is to offer continuing vocational education and training measures (92% of the enterprises affected). This applies regardless of whether the effects of globalisation are positive (e.g. product innovation) or more negative (e.g. cost pressure). In the case of reduction of the permanent staff as well, the compaction of work leads to higher demands on the remaining staff. However, the unskilled and semi-skilled employees are mostly exempted from these higher demands.
• The German enterprises are perfectly aware of the challenge of lifelong learning. They are prepared to make their contribution to realising the concept of lifelong learning, but the majority of them (53%) seek a compromise between the specific interests of the company and the demands of the concept. The majority of the enterprises (85% of the companies) realise that the implementation of the concept increasingly often involves a multiple burden (work, family and learning).
• Among the enterprises that offer in-company continuing vocational education and training, the range of "other" forms of continuing education and training offered has widened (with the exception of self-regulated learning with media). However, an increasing number of enterprises hesitate to assign all learning processes beyond classical continuing training to in-company continuing vocational education and training. Learning on the job takes place in a continuum between "learning-heavy working" and systematically designed learning through work.
• A surprisingly large number of enterprises (67%) are in favour of efforts to certify those competencies that employees have acquired in a job-integrated manner, for example through occupational experience. There are some tendencies in that direction in Germany (e.g. the external examination in the context of the dual system). There is considerable lost time to be made up for here, however, in comparison to other EU member states.
• The indirect costs play a very limited role, if any, in the thinking of German enterprises. In particular the costs of working hours lost are rarely an element in the company calculation of continuing education and training costs. For that reason the use of leisure time for continuing vocational education and training is a relevant option only under certain conditions. It is restricted either to certain offers or to certain sub-groups of employees. For a considerable proportion of the (usually) short offers the enterprises expect work to be shifted to free time.