The Wuppertaler Kreis e.V. - Bundesverband betriebliche Weiterbildung is the German federal association of the industry's leading continuing education institutions. In 2012, 1.3 million participants, mostly industry professionals and executives, chose continuing education for their professional qualification by attending one of the more than 131,000 seminars, training courses and events hosted by the member institutes of the Wuppertaler Kreis.
With their continuing education service provision in 2012, the combined institutes associated within the Wuppertaler Kreis achieved an annual turnover of 1.3 billion Euro. Most of these institutes expect the current year to result in a stable and in part even increasing turnover.
Since 2009, the Wuppertaler Kreis assesses the business situation indicator Continuing Education in the context of its annual association survey. The core of this indicator is a survey amongst the continuing education institutions regarding their market success in the past and current year as well as their expectations for the coming year. In addition to development of registration numbers and commissions, the evaluation includes also the development of the market prices for the range of service provisions on offer. Index values above 100 indicate a positive development, values below 100 report a drop.
This is already the third consecutive year for the institutes to expect stable growth. Although, at 119 points, the indicator is a little lower than in the previous years, the expectation for the coming year essentially continues to remain very positive.
The continuing education institutions constantly further develop their educational service proposition. For the coming years, the institutes expect growth impulses to be generated especially in the field of closely business-related services. Increasingly, continuing education events are developed in co-operation with the enterprises themselves to supplement change processes and they comprise, in addition to seminars, individual coaching measures and services related to the workplace.
New options for continuing education
The development of the internet offers new opportunities for in-company continuing education as a medium of learning and also for customer retention. The availability of broadband communication channels and fast data highways create new options for continuing education. In the field of audio and video formats in particular, the continuing education institutions expect an extremely positive development over the course of the next few years. In future, in-house continuing education will, with increasing frequency, no longer take place exclusively in the seminar room, but also on mobile devices and in the internet.
The most pressing problem of enterprises with regards to their human resource management is ensuring their demand for qualified employees. In doing so, the businesses rely on a long-term and trusting co-operation with the industry's continuing education institutions as their competent partners. The businesses place their main attention on qualifying their own employees in order to be able to fill specialist and executive posts with qualified personnel at any given time.
Moreover, it is important to tap into the potential inherent in the labour market and, for example, to encourage women after a period of focusing on family, long-term unemployed people and university dropouts and to integrate them into the businesses. The continuing education institutions support also the adaptation qualification for qualified personnel who were sourced abroad.
To a varying degree, more than half of the member institutions of the Wuppertaler Kreis carry out labour promotion measures in addition to their service provision directed at industry enterprises. After the institutes reported in part significant turnover drops in this market segment over the course of the past years, development has improved again in the past year for some of the providers of continuing education. Many institutes were able to achieve an increase of work contracts, for instance, for measures for the integration of disabled persons.