With this project, the European strategy of the institutions involved is to be continued and intensified. Good English skills are particularly important in the service sector, for example, if a call or a visitor from abroad is to be received. In retail, it is often important to know work processes in other countries in order to understand which steps, documents, etc. are required in international cooperation. At the same time, the applicant consortium would like to fulfill a social task within the framework of their training activities and to promote important skills such as tolerance, openness, independence of the students and foreign language skills. The international networking of many areas of our lives as well as the influx of people with refugee experience and the need for good integration into our society make the relevance of these topics clear again and again. The aim was also to build up long-term cooperation with the partners in England and Spain, which should go beyond the present project. This should consolidate the international orientation of the institutions involved and further improve the quality of the cooperation activities.
Nowadays, the business relationships of most companies are no longer limited to the German market. Whole Europe is increasingly becoming a procurement and sales market, if not even global markets. Apprentices for these foreign trade transactions must be qualified professionally, personally and socially. More and more companies are making these demands on their employees. In order to remain competitive, they need employees who can communicate with foreign partners. Commercial vocational schools in the state of Bremen respond to the needs of companies. They feel responsible for providing their students with international qualifications. The European dimension of the training is to be expanded, foreign language skills and openness are to be integrated even more clearly as part of the training in the existing curricula. The Helmut Schmidt School has been allowed to call itself a European school since 2021, which makes the European focus of the school even more visible to the public. This project is part of the qualification to become a European businessman, which has been offered at six Bremen vocational schools since February 2017. In this additional training, the students should broaden their perspectives on the European labor market. They gain a knowledge advantage over other trainees and acquire specialist knowledge that opens up new, interesting fields of work for them. By integrating a job-related internship abroad as a module of the additional qualification, the participants strengthen important skills during their training and thus save time compared to those who only take the opportunity of such further training after the training. Last but not least, the trainees increase their chances of being hired in their own company and their chances of professional advancement. With this project, the participating partner institutions offer their trainees the opportunity to have this mandatory stay abroad financially subsidized with the help of the scholarship, but also to have organizational support. This is intended to increase the attractiveness and willingness to participate in the additional qualification. The offer of participation in an internship abroad is also open to all other students of the participating institutions, not just those who are completing the additional qualification.