The mobilities for students/trainees aim, among other things, to provide the participants with additional competences, for example with regard to the acquisition of intercultural competence and foreign language skills, as well as to promote the development of their personal competences. The experience abroad enables them to stand out from other applicants on the labour market. For the full-school trainees in the field of foreign language secretarial services, gaining practical work experience as well as experiencing a non-school working day is also important. As far as staff mobilities are concerned, they have various objectives. They range from learning new professional skills, to refreshing methodological or language skills, or introducing innovative learning concepts. In addition, job shadowing activities are used to learn from colleagues abroad, to develop new ideas and to exchange with each other. All these activities ultimately aim to improve the quality of teaching and school development. Of course, things like intercultural openness, readiness for lifelong learning and individual motivation are also to be promoted.
The project was carried out by the Kaufmännischen Schulen der Universitätsstadt Marburg (KSM), which offer various educational programmes in the vocational fields of business and administration as well as health and education. KSM can already look back on many years of experience in the field of transnational mobilities. The project was carried out as part of the implementation of measures to achieve the goals of our school’s internationalisation strategy. KSM’s internationalisation strategy is based on three pillars: - continuous foreign language teaching in all school types and various opportunities for stays abroad - Curricular anchoring of intercultural projects and modules on topics such as Europe, globalisation, fair trade, etc. - opportunities for in-service training and stays abroad for teachers of all subjects.