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Vocational Training Trip creates new connections
For those wanting to learn about business in another part of the world, a Vocational Training Trip is the perfect way to gain hands-on experience.
March 21-29, two Bloomington Rotarians, two instructors and two students from Hennepin Technical College (HTC) spent a week in Stuttgart, Germany on a Rotary Vocational Training trip. During the week, the group visited German companies, technical schools and the Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce to learn and share best practices in technical careers. The team also visited four Rotary clubs in Stuttgart and met with Dist. 1830 Governor Bernhard Gailing.
The team was particularly interested in the German “dual vocational system,” a three-year program in which a student spends two-thirds of his or her time working in a technical job (including salary) and one-third of the time in the classroom.
The team also discovered that German businesses have a much closer relationship with technical schools than we do in the U.S. The German government pays technical school tuition, while businesses pay the students a standard salary.
One of the technical schools visited expressed interest in pursuing an exchange program with HTC in the future, and one of the companies we visited (Zeiss Corp), which has an existing Maple Grove assembly factory, expressed an interest in a possible dual vocational system here in Minnesota.