We had three objectives. The first objective: the development of professional competences: the professional soft and hard skills. Acquiring new or training already acquired competencies was central. They also became acquainted with an international corporate culture. As a second objective, we wanted students to broaden their world view and their own horizons through the introduction to another culture. Living together in the host family and organizing and participating in various activities on site challenged the young people to enter into a dialogue with the diversity of traditions and views. At the same time, self-reliance was also worked on because the young people had to organize themselves. Pushing personal boundaries was also judged by the participants as the strongest growth factor afterwards. A third objective was that of the, for this curriculum, hard skill: the professional use of English, the lingua franca in the business world. Strengthening the technical terminology was important here. At the same time, we increased the courage to speak not only through the internship, but also through the stay with the host family.
Our school has been organizing education for 191 years and has about 1500 students and 200 employees. The pupils are between 12 and 19 years old and follow secondary education at our school. We offer general, technical and vocational education, especially in the fields of economics, welfare, art (fashion) and STEM (limited). As a school with different vocational options, we prepare students for the labor market. To increase their chances on the labor market, it is important that their professional competences are well developed. Internships are also organized for this purpose: these allow the student to learn how to apply the skills acquired at school in a work context. In an international internship like this, more and other work-related hard and soft skills were also worked on that were difficult to realize in our local own internship context and yet are very functional in the labor market context. For pupils in vocational education, who are often financially weaker, this was a great opportunity to gain experience abroad. Staying with a foreign-speaking host family in a different culture also had to challenge them. We focused on the pupils growth.