This project was designed to give four different groups of employees the opportunity to develop new skills. The four groups are: a) Educational managers - planning and organising our educational programme b) Administrative staff - assisting the above, for repeating tasks, learner enrolment, etc. c) Freelance teachers - providing the actual teaching of most courses d) Staff teachers - providing 2nd Chance classes For these we defined sets of competences that should be improved; the sets were different for each group; the sets combined selected items from the following list: - Improving the ability to use a foreign language at work - Improved communication skills with a divers and increasingly international customer base - Intercultural competence - Awareness for, and ability to deal with, diversity - Awareness for accessibility and inclusion - Ability to use digital tools in education - Ability to address the needs of the “information society” - Use of up-to-date learning techniques and knowledge management - Familiarity with new approaches in pedagogy, didactics, methodology - A sense of being European With these skills, we hoped, our staff members would be able to help making VHS Hannover fit for the 21st century.
VHS Hannover is a municipal adult education centre with 100 salaried employees and 700 freelance teachers providing 100 000 hours of teaching p/a to an overall population of 500 000 in Hannover, capital of Lower Saxony. As such, VHS Hannover faces multiple challenges in the 21st century. They include generational change, increasing diversity in society, integration of foreign-born citizens, the need of better accessibility of education for all groups of the society including educationally and economically disadvantaged, the development of new technologies worldwide and their societal impact, and the increasing need of international ways of work. All this asks for additional competences of our staff, in all four functions: a) planning andragogues b) freelance teachers c) staff teachers d) administrative employees (i.e. who are in day-to-day contact with customers and are often the first person whom a newcomer to VHS Hannover will have contact with). The aim of this project was to give all four groups of staff the opportunity to improve their competences in the areas mentioned above, to grow their awareness for these topics, and to make them fit to find new solutions to these challenges.