iMOVE interview with Hansjoerg Luettke, Managing Director, August, 2010.
iMOVE: What is the name and background of your organisation?
Hansjoerg Luettke: KWB was founded in 1990 by the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, enterprise associations, trade unions and the Hamburg Workforce Development Agency to support Hamburg’s labour market in the field of training, development of personal competencies and employment. Since then KWB has been providing innovative concepts for education and vocational training. We consult on how to set up and finance educational projects, develop and manage educational programmes and design training curricula for various target groups. KWB is the major owner of the TLA TeleLearn-Akademie GmbH, an online distance-learning college.
iMOVE: Which services in the field of vocational education and training do you offer?
Luettke: We offer vocational training for various industries like logistics, information technology and media, business administration and many more. Train-the-trainer courses, online distance-learning courses like Bachelor of Media Engineering and European Business Competence Licence as well as intercultural trainings are part of our portfolio.
iMOVE: What are your international business experiences?
Luettke: So far we have been working with partners all over Europe, in the USA and in parts of Asia. Together we have developed and promoted training-projects, conferences, internet-accessible databases, fairs and internship programmes. We are also a member of GENEV (German Education Network for Employability in Vietnam), a network of German service providers for vocational and continuing education.
iMOVE: Which key service do you have on offer for a successful cooperation with international partners?
Luettke: Our partners expect us to support them in adjusting their vocational education and training systems to our high German standards and to international standards as well. We have recently signed a treaty with representatives of the Vietnamese city Hai Phong, which is regarded as “port of Hanoi” with great logistic importance in relation to northern Vietnam and China. The city and the region around Hai Phong with about 1.8 million inhabitants need vocational qualification programmes in many fields like transport and logistics, shipbuilding, engineering, electronics and telecommunications.
By upgrading their training concepts and curricula we help them to become internationally competitive and to thus ensure Vietnam’s sustainable growth. Currently a delegation of twelve lecturers from technical colleges based in the Chinese province Zheijang is visiting Hamburg. In the context of a three-week intensive course they want to get to know the German system of further education. Here as well, the aim is the acceleration of the transfer of economically successful concepts of vocational education.
