What is Germany’s dual education system — and why do other countries want it?

Photo Credit: Deutsche Welle April 6, 2018
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The German economy is powered by products sold the world over. The strength of Europe's powerhouse depends on outbound shipments. We take a look at one of its latest exports and reveal the secrets behind its success. Charlotte Falke creates technical drawings of power plant generators. The 23-year-old designer, a trainee at German industrial giant Siemens, spent a year at university before opting for a more vocational program. "I left because there was too much theory," she said. "I wanted more practice." Falke is not alone. Over 50 percent of Germans enter dual vocational and educational training programs (VET) as a route into employment. They choose from 326 professional trades that include diamond cutters, aircraft mechanics and even chimney sweeps. The system is widely credited with fueling the German export engine. Outside the country, some tout it as a solution to rising youth unemployment. So how does VET work — and is it worth the hype?
Theory and practice
"The basic idea is duality," said Ralf Hermann, head of the German Office for International Cooperation in Vocational Education and Training (GOVET). "That means integrating school-based learning with work-based practice." Like most apprentices, Falke spends a few days a week at college learning foundation skills, such as math and language, as well as the theory underpinning her work. The rest of her time is spent mainly in the office designing products. The balance means she is able to produce technical drawings to industry standards and interact with her clients in English. "A broader education in school is necessary to provide the soft skills that make responsible young people," said Hermann, who points to the need for flexibility in a rapidly changing digital economy. "Occupations have a broader sense of skills than mere training for one particular job."
Outside interest
Vocational training exists in many countries, but such schemes are rarely as popular as in Germany. More young people follow VET programs than go to university, even though many are qualified for further study. Apprenticeships are standardized across the country — every product designer must study the same textbooks and be familiar with the same design tools — so employment prospects do not vary greatly by college or company. Most join their training company after three years of low-paid work and study. This is important for the German economy, which has one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the EU, and also the largest trade surplus. In 2017 Germany exported €1.279 trillion ($1.571 trillion) worth of goods and imported €1.034 trillion. Some countries looking to balance their trade books are keen to learn from the German model. Ivanka Trump, adviser to protectionist US President Donald Trump, has expressed interest in bringing dual vocational training schemes to the US. Speaking to German weekly Wirtschaftswoche last year, Ms. Trump described Germany's apprenticeship system as "a great trailblazer." "The perception of our international partners is quite right," said Hermann. "Part of the economic stability in Germany is due to the core elements of the VET, in that we produce a workforce that is ready for the labor markets."
History of training
One reason for VET's success in Germany is a culture of apprenticeships that stretches back to the middle ages. The practical component of study is so pervasive in German education that many young people even opt for semi-vocational university courses. "This mixture you can't find in any other concept," said Marius Berger, a salesman at a German car manufacturer. The 27-year-old completed a dual study program in automotive retail, alternating 50/50 between three-month stints at university and internships at the company's headquarters. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2012 and has stayed with the company since. "I searched for the possibility to combine my love for German cars with a good economic study program," said Berger. "For me it wasn't an option to do a normal Bachelor degree without any practical part." But feeding such systems into countries without a culture of vocational training poses problems. While Germany provides technical advice to countries looking to implement VET systems, such as Mexico and Russia, organizations such as GOVET are hesitant to describe vocational education as an export hit. "A system that has grown in Germany under very specific conditions cannot just be exported to another country under very different conditions," said Hermann. DW-Deutsche Welle

A Coffee Empire Grows, as Panera Is Sold to JAB Holding Company By Stephanie Strom and Chad Bray

LONDON — Over the last several years, a European family business has spent more than $40 billion assembling a coffee empire. JAB Holding Company has acquired the American brands Peet’s Coffee, Caribou Coffee and Keurig Green Mountain, all since 2012. It also combined the European coffee giant D.E. Master Blenders 1753 with the coffee business of Mondelez to create a company now known as Jacobs Douwe Egbert. Then it bought the high-end coffee retailers Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Intelligentsia. Mondelez continues to own 25 percent of Douwe Egbert and has a similar stake in Keurig. Now JAB needs somewhere to sell all that coffee. On Wednesday, JAB, which is privately held, said it would add the Panera restaurant chain to its growing empire of American coffee and food favorites for $7.5 billion, including debt. It is only the latest effort to expand into restaurants by JAB, the investment arm of the Reimann family of Germany, who are heirs to the consumer goods company Joh. A. Benckiser. In 2014, JAB bought the bagel chain Einstein Brothers, which it has been combining with Caribou is some markets. And last year, it paid $1.35 billion for Krispy Kreme, the struggling doughnut chain. In Panera, JAB will acquire a popular fast casual chain that serves soups, salads, sandwiches and baked goods at about 2,000 locations. Panera has set itself apart by offering relatively healthy options and being one of the first national restaurant chains to distance itself from high fructose corn syrup. But Panera, which went public in 1991, has chafed under Wall Street’s relentless demand for growth. Ron Shaich, Panera’s personable chief executive who controls roughly 15 percent of its stock, said one of the biggest attractions to the JAB deal was the chance to take his company private. “For the last 20 years, I’ve spent 20 percent of my time telling people what we’ve done to grow and another 20 percent of my time telling people what we’re going to do to grow,” Mr. Shaich said in an interview. “I won’t have to do that anymore.” Investment analysts have speculated for years that Mr. Shaich, 63, has been looking for a way to reduce his role at the company after spending more than two decades building it up from a tiny 400-square foot cookie store in Boston. Mr. Shaich, however, said that he planned to continue to lead Panera. “Nothing will change,” he said. “The management team and I will remain.” With the acquisition of Panera, JAB will have spent more than $40 billion in what appears to be a big bet that it can muscle in on a market dominated by Starbucks and Nestlé. It takes on Panera at a time when it has two large turnarounds on its hands, Krispy Kreme and Keurig Green Mountain. The doughnut chain was a phenomenon several years ago, then fell on hard times and has never fully recovered. Keurig, which dominates the single-serve coffee market, has struggled as competition cut into its profitability. Then it made a big bet that fell flat on a single-serve machine to make cold drinks, and JAB stepped in. The restaurant business in general has been in the doldrums for the last couple of years, with most big chains struggling to eke out increases in same-store sales of even 1 or 2 percent. Panera has done better than most. The company moved faster than others to build a mobile ordering system and cleanse its menu of ingredients like artificial preservatives and high fructose corn syrup that consumers do not want. The NPD Group, a research and consulting firm, predicts that traffic in restaurants in the United States will remain stalled this year as well. The firm predicts that quick-service restaurant chains like McDonald’s and KFC, which account for 80 percent of the total traffic in the restaurant industry, will see a 1 percent increase in visits this year. On Wednesday when it announced the deal with JAB, Panera said its same-store sales in its company-owned stores were up 5.3 percent, which is stronger than most. But roughly 60 percent of its stores are owned by franchisees, with sales in those units not doing as well. Mr. Shaich said that was because the fruits of initiatives like the mobile ordering system, which were rolled out first in company-owned stores, have yet to fully show up in the performance of franchisees. He said JAB had no plans to make changes. “They are hands off,” Mr. Shaich said. “These guys have a track record for investing in great brands and companies and letting management do their jobs.” Under the terms of the transaction, JAB BV, the investment vehicle executing the transaction for JAB, would pay $315 a share, representing a premium of 30 percent to Panera’s 30-day volume-weighted average stock price as of March 31, the last trading day before media reports that Panera was exploring a potential sale. JAB BV would also assume about $340 million in net debt. “We strongly support Panera’s vision for the future, strategic initiatives, culture of innovation, and balanced company versus franchise store mix,” Olivier Goudet, JAB’s chief executive, said in a news release. “We are excited to invest in and work together with the company’s management team and franchisees to continue to lead the industry.” The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter and is subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. Mr. Shaich and entities affiliated with him have agreed to vote shares representing about 15.5 percent of the company’s voting stock in favor of the transaction. Morgan Stanley and the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell are advising Panera. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and BDT Capital Partners, and the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom are advising JAB. In addition, entities affiliated with BDT are acting as minority investors alongside JAB, which they also did in the Krispy Kreme deal. International New York Times

Bono’s tech-y daughter Jordan heads up Brooklyn startup By Debbie McGoldrick

Photo Credit: ActionButton.org

Bono has spent almost as much time traveling the world on behalf of his humanitarian projects as he has with U2.  So it’s no surprise that his eldest child, daughter Jordan, has taken a leaf out of Dad’s book with her first big project. Jordan, 27, is head of her own Brooklyn-based tech start up, Speakable, which last week launched its new product – an “action button” that will appear on news sites which allows readers to instantly respond to stories they are reading on a page either via a poll, signing a petition or donating to the story’s relevant cause.  Companies that have already signed on to include the action button on their content include the Huffington Post and Vice. Hewson told CBS News that the idea for the product came to her after reading about the heroic Pakistani schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot multiple times on her school bus and miraculously survived.  The article, Hewson said, linked to a petition to support the education of girls worldwide, but she never clicked. It made her think that if the petition was right there on the page, it would have been easier to take action. “I never clicked on the link,” Hewson told CBS. “Ten minutes later, I thought, ‘If I’m not going to sign this, who will?’ I started to think very seriously about the barriers that exist to taking action and engaging with content. If we make it faster and easier to affect the things people care about, it will be more likely that they will actually do something.” Bono is not involved with Speakable, which raised $2 million earlier this year.  “My dad is a good resource, but I try to keep him away from the company as much as possible,” Jordan told Fortune. But his influence is clear to see in his daughter. “From a young age, I was always attending interesting events or conferences or interesting parts of the world. My family did an incredible job of educating us, of trying to keep us balanced in terms of what we saw in our environments,” Hewson said. This generation, she feels, wants to make an impact, and the action button will allow them to do just that. “Millennials have different expectations of digital content,” she said. “They want to do more than read headlines — they want to change headlines.” Irish Central Photo Action Button

How Stockholm's cold climate boosts creativity

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Picture the scene: Dusk begins to settle on Stockholm, magnifying the glow from the candle-lit windows that warm the city. Frost invades the Swedish capital as quickly as the sun fades, the vicious bite of the ice ushering people indoors. It’s dark, it’s cold and (this is the best part) it’s only 3pm! Welcome to winter in Stockholm. As soon as those telltale signs of autumn start to appear, tingeing the city a crisp, golden shade of brown, preparations for winter truly commence. Boats are lifted from the harbours, thermals are dug out of the basements, and winter tyres are readied for the vehicles. But no matter how harsh or relentless the winter here may be, Swedes don’t go into hibernation, and Stockholm does not do long winter naps. On the contrary: it’s during these long, dark winters, that Stockholm arguably makes its name as the Creative Capital of the World. Sure, summer in Stockholm is beautiful, but it’s when the sun disappears for half a year that the Swedes stop dawdling around the archipelago and spend more time, attention, and energy on other activities...like launching startups. The impressive startup scene in Stockholm turns heads around the world, and for good reason too. The Swedish capital is home to five of the biggest unicorns around the globe, including tech giants Spotify, Skype, Klarna, Mojang and King (the Candy Crush folk). So what’s the secret behind Stockholm’s startup success? “Creative people tend to be night owls, and in Sweden we get two nights per day for half of the year,” claims Kaj Drobin, co-founder of the e-commerce Stockholm startup Tictail. Kaj co-founded the company in 2012 alongside Siavash Ghorbani, Birk Nilsson and Carl Waldekranz. Now, according to Kaj, “Tictail is the go-to destination for emerging designers, with a sprawling marketplace of 100,000 independent brands from 140 countries around the world.” A key ingredient to Tictail’s recipe for success, however, is the cold and dark climate of their Stockholm roots. “Since the dark and cloudy climate mostly keeps us indoors, we put focus and energy into finding unique solutions to complex projects to keep the days from being mundane,” Kaj explains. “Our minds are constantly moving. We never get stuck, even if we're stuck inside all day.” And Tictail aren’t alone in this theory. Victoria Bastide, CTO of Stockholm-based startup Lifesum, also believes the bitter Swedish climate can aid the creative process, and subsequent success of startups in Stockholm. “As so much time is spent indoors because of the cold, it leaves a lot of time to come up with creative and exciting ideas,” she says. “We spend a lot of time with our family and friends in the winter, which means that any ideas that we do come up with can be discussed in plenty of detail, with constructive input from others. This usually means that the idea is not only good, but a lot of thought has gone into its execution, increasing its chances of success.” Speaking of spending time with family and friends, there are few better ways to evade the frosty outdoors than with a fika in a warm and welcoming café with good company. This winter, startups will come together for an invigorating coffee at Sup46’s brand new Startup Café. Sup46 – a startup hub launched to bring startups together (genius!) – is at the very heart of Stockholm’s thriving startup community. Jessica Stark, CEO and co-founder of Sup46, agrees that the harsh Stockholm climate makes for an excellent startup environment. “What more is there to do between October and May than letting your brain work in mysterious ways?” she asks. “The climate encourages you to be creative with your time… Also, too much cold and darkness is bad for the brain – best to stay in front of the luminous screen of your laptop making time pass by building something extraordinary!” But it’s not just about what the Swedish climate makes us do, it’s also about how we do it. Over at podcasting platform Acast, Karl Rosander, co-founder and President, and Måns Ulvestam, CEO and co-founder, consider the cold and dark Swedish climate to be beneficial for the character of budding entrepreneurs. “It [the cold and dark climate] makes us tenacious,” they say, “Which we think is the most important skill or talent for entrepreneurs.” So embrace the ice this winter in Stockholm, appreciate the absent natural light, and applaud the subzero Baltic breeze. Because somewhere in the city, someone – a young, tenacious entrepreneur – is sheltering from the cold, directing all their time, energy and focus towards the next startup from Stockholm. Invest Stockholm and The Local-Sweden Photo

Why the rich promise of Asia begins in Hong Kong

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Hong Kong and the United Kingdom have long enjoyed rewarding relations. That is certainly true of trade and commercial ties. The UK was Hong Kong’s second-largest trading partner in the EU and 12th-largest trading partner in the world last year, with trade exceeding £8.6bn. It is also the gateway to the Mainland of China. Last year, it was estimated that more than 8pc of trade between the UK and the Mainland, worth £4.8bn, went through Hong Kong, underlining its value to UK business.
Hong Kong’s intermediary role is evident in the more than 600 UK companies based there. They include some of the world’s leading corporations, in a wide variety of sectors, along with an increasing number of start-ups.
"Hong Kong, the fast-beating business heart of Asia, is where the world wants to be." Meanwhile, deepening economic integration with the Mainland continues to create opportunity for Hong Kong and the companies that work with it. The Outline of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, which was published in March, supports the enhancement of Hong Kong’s strengths as an international trade, transportation and financial centre. And the Mainland’s far-reaching Belt and Road Initiative, which is designed to boost connectivity among a total of 65 countries on three continents, offers unparalleled opportunities for Hong Kong business and finance. Beyond the Mainland, Hong Kong continues to expand its reach. It is now finalising a free trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Hong Kong’s second-largest trading partner. The agreement, which is expected to be concluded by the end of the year, will boost Hong Kong’s trade and investment ties with ASEAN, one of the world’s largest trading blocs. British companies look to Hong Kong in building markets in the Mainland, and throughout Asia, for good reason. Like the rest of the business world, they trust Hong Kong. "Last year, it was estimated that more than 8pc of trade between the UK and the Mainland went through Hong Kong." In February, the Washington-based Heritage Foundation named Hong Kong as the world’s freest economy, for the 22nd year in a row. It helps that Hong Kong’s common-law legal system was modelled on Britain’s own. Hong Kong’s free-market economy invites a free flow of people, information and capital. That in turn boosts the city’s standing as a major international commercial hub and investment capital. Last year, Hong Kong was the world’s eighth-largest trading entity in goods. It ranked second in the world in foreign direct investment inflow. In short, Hong Kong, the fast-beating business heart of Asia, is where the world wants to be. For information on Hong Kong arts and culture, visit brandhk.gov.hk The Telegraph

Nestlé celebrates 150 years with museum openings

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Swiss food behemoth Nestlé marks its 150th birthday with the opening of two museums in its hometown of Vevey this month.
New museum Nest takes visitors on a journey through the company’s history, while the renovated Alimentarium is a hands-on exhibition and educational space dedicated to food. The Alimentarium will be free to the public during an open house weekend on June 4th-5th as it reopens after a 19.8 million franc renovation. Originally opened in 1985 on the lakefront in Vevey, the Alimentarium was the first in the world to explore food and human nutrition. A nine-month renovation project has completely redesigned the museum, which now sports a new permanent exhibition, a multilingual digital archive and a ‘Food Academy’ where members of the public can take cooking classes. Among the museum’s culinary activities, children and teenagers can learn how to cook in daytime and weekend sessions, while adults can sign up for evening classes designed by chef Philippe Ligron, a well-known TV chef and teacher at Lausanne's hospitality school EHL. Its educational outreach programme includes a website displaying 400 items related to food history in 360-degree high definition, and an online programme for teachers and pupils.
Nestlé's birthplace

Meanwhile, the new 50 million franc Nest was officially inaugurated on Thursday and will open to the public on June 15th. Based in the factory in the Bosquets district of Vevey where Henry Nestlé invented his famous Farine Lactée baby formula in 1867, Nest takes visitors on an immersive journey through the company’s history and its products, including Nesquik hot chocolate powder, Nespresso instant coffee and Maggi seasoning. Described as a discovery centre rather than a museum, its director Catherine Saurais said at the inauguration on Thursday: “The objective isn’t to tell the story for the sake of the story. "What nest offers is a special way to revisit the meanderings of our own history, to examine the questions surrounding food production in the world today, and to explore a passionate vision of nutrition in an engaging manner.” Split into four themed parts, Nest’s interactive elements include a body scanner where visitors can learn about the impact of certain foods on the body’s organs. A huge employer in the area, including many expats, Nestlé is a prominent presence in Vevey. Stefano Stroll, director of the Festival Images Vevey, said in a statement that the new museum is “an occasion to better understand” the company. “Although Nestlé stands out here, little is known about this global multinational, which is a mix of tradition and innovation. “Nest arouses curiosity, whilst explaining and illustrating Nestlé’s major impact on the region.” Over its long history it has built some of the world’s best known food brands, including Nescafe, Nesquik and Nepresso. It has also acquired brands including Carnation, Findus frozen foods, Movenpick ice cream and San Pellegrino. The Local-Switzerland Photo