A Career in Milestones

“You will get the right skills with an apprenticeship, son!”

Those were my mother’s words when, at the age of 18 in 1974, I came home with a two-year contract in my pocket for an apprenticeship at a local bank. I’d decided not to go to college right away, because I wanted to get some work experience and start earning some money. Even though I eventually did go to college, I still look back on that decision as one of the best career moves I ever made.

Young people weighing their career options ought to consider making the same choice. ILO estimates from 2014 put the number of unemployed young people at over 74.5 million worldwide. Many of them were college graduates who cannot find work even despite their years of study.

By contrast, the level of youth unemployment has always been lower in countries like Austria, Germany and Denmark, where 40-50 per cent of young people do work-based apprenticeships.

If you’re a young person today like I was in 1974 trying to pick a career path, here are five reasons why an apprenticeship might be right for you:

1. You will learn valuable job skills

There’s no substitute for learning on the job, and that’s what you do with an apprenticeship. A good programme should provide real workplace training together with other skills like language-learning, computer literacy and AI, entrepreneurship and technical math. They’re all geared towards helping you get a job in your field, whether you’re a car mechanic, IT specialist, bank clerk, hairdresser, electrician, mason, etc.

Michael at age 17 in Prague, in 1973

2. You will earn a salary

As an apprentice, you will sign an employment contract for a specific time with an employer, which can be up to four years depending on the kind of programme. Your salary will usually go up from one year to the next as you learn new and more valuable skills. So, rather than paying tuition to learn future job skills, you will “earn while you learn”.

3. You will gain independence

You may think of an apprenticeship as getting your hands dirty at the expense of a traditional education, but consider this: in countries like Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands, apprenticeship programmes are quite prestigious. It’s easy to see why: apprentices gain their independence earlier than their peers, together with skills that help to ensure they get to keep them.

4. You will jump-start your career

How many job applications have you completed and how frustrating was it when you were rejected? How many internships have you done and how many times were you not paid for your hard work? Apprentices, by contrast, start their careers when they’re as young as 17 years old. University graduates hunting for jobs in their twenties will envy the paid work experience and retirement benefits that you will have accumulated in the meantime..

Michael and family in 1978

5. You will open doors

Whatever you decide to do in life, an apprenticeship will open the door to the world of work. You can stick with what you’ve learnt and pursue a future in carpentry, IT services or some other technical field. Or you can go to university and top up your work skills with an advanced degree in architecture, software engineering or city planning. Either way, you won’t regret those valuable job skills, which will serve you for the rest of your life!

I was so happy in the fall of 1980 when with my Bachelor Degree in Economics...

...from the University of Bielefeld in Germany in Economics and Business under the arm, I got a job offer from the Faculty of Economics as a tutor in labour market economics for a basic course for students on the other side of the hall in Social Sciences in the Faculty of Sociology!

The job as a tutor was to “break down” lectures of professors from the Faculty of Economics and Economic History into “bite-size” pieces for the first semester students in social science.

Four hours of lectures of professors every week were linked to my tutorial of two hours every week in the winter semester 1980/1981 from October 1980 until February 1981 for a total of about 20 weeks of tutorials.

Michael skiing in 1980

It was my first teaching experience at university level for undergraduate studies and I remember on the one side how well prepared I went into this experience and on the other side how nervous I was when in October 1980 I walked into my first tutorial with about 20 students that were given to me in my group.

However, when we talked about the plan for the 20 sessions in the tutorial, to my surprise the students did not necessarily only want to get a better understanding of the lectures of the professors with regard to the mathematical explanations and the economic implications that were given to them, but much rather were they interested in the psychological and day-to-day effects of unemployment and especially of long-term unemployment on the well-being of the people.

So, the group decided that – under my guidance – we would do a film trying to document these effects through interviews with people in the streets of Bielefeld, by visiting long-term unemployed self-help groups in the region and by adding regional data on unemployment in Ostwestfalen/Lippe, the region we were all living in.

I must admit that in comparison to the other tutorials in the same course, my students were much more motivated to finish their final product, which was the film that we produced and showed at the final event in February 1981.

Other groups had written research and university papers, but the product of my students was the film, including performing a role play in the film by the students and presenting an atmosphere of what it meant at that time to be long- term unemployed in our region.

The film was shown at the final weekend workshop and it received a long applause by the more than 150 other students and the 5 professors attending and made us all very proud!

For me as a young researcher and a master student at the Faculty of Economics, there were two take-aways from this first work experience at the university level.

Michael and his best Friend in 1983

Academic research in labour market economics in Germany with empirical evidence and policy implications was one important thing, but the other thing was to look at unemployment from a social perspective, including psychological, medical and other effects and developing sympathy for the research objective by doing that.

Secondly, it taught me to become more focussed in my studies on other aspects influencing my economic work and I began to study more broadly in my master’s programme. Later I learnt how to implement my work more sustainably by reflecting on other socio-economic fields, such as psychology, philosophy, ethics, economic history and many other areas, including environmental and ecological ones.

It eventually led me to working with the International Labour Organisation as an economist and involving perspectives of many different constituents, such as employers, workers’ organizations, governments and civil society.

In retrospect, I am very glad that my university students in 1980 in social sciences helped me understand all these perspectives early on as a young economist!

In 1978 the Green Party was founded in Germany and a student still then – I was one of the first to join them...

In direct answer to many political deficiencies in Germany then, the Greens founded their party on principles of ecology, social welfare and Basis Demokratie.

Ecology then meant the insight of the limitations of our resources, and the limited likelihood of ever-increasing growth as anticipated by other political parties in Germany. The stability of the ecosystem was regarded as the basic necessity of the survival of this and future generations. The stability and partnership with nature was the very foundation of all Green policies.

Their social-oriented politics revealed a primarily economic consideration. The Greens wanted to fight the unequal distribution of income, unemployment and unhuman working conditions, and the destruction of industrial structures. They stood for self-determination of the workers in the production process, the reduction of the weekly working load and improved human working relation and easily comprehensible working arrangements.

Michael in Bonn in 1983

Basis Demokratie, as they understood it meant better realization of decentralized and direct democracy. The decisions of the Basis (an equivalent word would be “grassroots”) were considered to be more important and Basis units were supposed to get mor autonomy and more rights in self-Administration. Participation of the people at all time and for comparatively many decisions and decision-processes was the key concept.

It can easily be seen that the decision in the early 1980s by our German Government in conjunction with the US Government to deploy middle- and long-range nuclear weapons in Germany to defy Soviet nuclear armament was in strong violation of all these principles of the Greens and led me to become a peace activist in huge demonstrations in Bonn Germany in 1981 and 1983 with close to 500,000 participants in each of them.

Michael with a friend in 1983

The ultimate principle of the Greens was that human goals could not be achieved by inhuman instruments. However, it was clearly understood that non-violence does not interfere with the fundamental right of self-defence, nor with social resistance and civil disobedience. In other words, non-violence emphatically does not mean passivity of the concerned, but rather follows most naturally from the principles of nonviolence that in norder to defend people from oppressive actions, resistance against the government is not only legitimate but indispensable.

Michael and his roommates in 1983

Concerning the conduct of international relations, the Greens developed several principles. They demanded worldwide disarmament and the formation of a new European peace strategy, calling for unilateral disarmament of Germany as an example for other nations. They demanded worldwide disarmament and the formation of a new European peace strategy and they wanted a reduction of German military production, but rather focus on new arrangement for alternative energy systems and greater production for environmental protection. In doing so, the Greens have become part of the international peace movement in a way that no other German political parties had.

The reader might find that some of these principles have been put into political policies, most have not. Maybe that is the reason why more than 40 years later, I am still an active political Green party member fighting for the implementation of all of these policies and I certainly tried so during my later work live in the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s.

The beginning for this enthusiasm, however, lay in the 1980s and certainly the mass demonstrations for peace in Germany and in Europe in 1981 and 1983 have helped to shape me into the person that has tried all his work life to put some of these elements into practical political implications!

It is hard to believe that this is less than 40 years ago...

...but it happened in the summer of 1988 when working for the ILO in the Skills Department then, I had to organize an international workshop on vocational school management in Geneva and I did so with two colleagues from Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). At the end of the preparation day, the two and I were walking back from the Palais de Nations to the ILO in Geneva, when one of them started telling me that he would send an email with today’s conclusions to his colleagues at CIDA in Canada’s capital Ottawa.

Michael and his parents in 1986

I remember that I asked him right away what an email was, because we in the ILO barely hat computers, let alone laptops at the time and would rather use telexes in order to send messages overseas. When you look back now in 2026 you might think how naïve Michael must have been in those years, but the information technology at that time was just starting to take off. A couple of years later, we all had laptops and email addresses and as of 2010, when I was back in the ILO, we would probably receive 100 emails per today and would send out an equal number. However, in 1988, the technology was not that much advanced and mostly were we looking to North America for computer innovation.

Toasting with a friend

It is hard to imagine that even a few years before 1988 when still studying in Germany at the University of Bielefeld in the early 1980s, we had to buy ourselves into the computer centre in the University and bring our punching cards to feed them into the mainframe computer of the University to do computer operations.

Michael in Switzerland, 1988

How much the computerization of our lives and the ever growing internet changed our work and other activities is only visible in retrospect when you talk about punching punch cards in order to get computer operations and when you hear about emails in the 1988 when maybe less than 1 million people world wide had access to the internet with their own email addresses!

In 1992 I was asked by the state institute of teacher training in Soest, NRW, Germany to moderate a workshop on the Future of Vocational Teacher Training in my state.

Teachers from 15 pilot schools in NRW were put into a micro situation of playing a strategic planning situation. The focus was on the future of vocational teacher training in NRW and the exercise was carried out in three blocks of 90-minute sessions in one afternoon session in the Regional State Institute for Teacher Training (Landesinstitut für Schule und Weiterbildung) in Soest, Germany.

For this situation, together with my co-moderator I decided to use one method of Robert Jung for this teaching experiment. Robert Jung had done research in the 60s and 70s in Italy about bringing out creative potential in people and developed a method, which is widely known as Zukunftswerkstatt in German, the English translation would probably be “Future Lab”.

In the first phase of a future lab, participants criticize the present situation; everything is allowed to be said without evaluation. Criticism is written on cards, structured, clustered and headlines for joint points are found.

Michael ready for a gala in 1992

The second phase throws the participants into a phantastic and utopian situation in which coming up with "wild" solutions is called for. The participants are asked to fantasize about utopian solutions and to present their solutions in words, texts, role-plays, or whatever comes to their minds.

The third phase brings the participants down to earth again, asking them to think about how they can realize their ideas in real life and which steps are necessary to do that. Finally, each group has to present its solutions, and milestones will be set up to monitor and evaluate the success of each plan.

Michael and a friend, 1992

In the first phase, the teachers were expected to come up with heaps of discomfort and they actually did! Various interactive and group-dynamic methods were used to work with the whole group. After all the criticism was expressed, it was piled, structured and clustered. This phase lasted about 90 minutes.

However, the second phase, the utopian part of the future lab, came up with very creative ideas by the German vocational teachers and the individual groups had enough time to research and present their ideas. These work forms and the intensity of the work transcended everything the teachers had experienced before in school or in universities, and a lot of laughter, but also sincerity and willpower were found on the second stretch of this experiment. The presentations of the utopian ideas in the plenary were both funny and very creative.

Before the final phase of the future lab, the groups were mixed again as before in the second phase, and they all worked again on preparing strategies to implement their plans. In the end, the moderators invited representatives from the Ministry of Education to attend the presentation phase and see which of the ideas could eventually be turned into real-life teacher training in Northrhine-Westphalia in Germany.

The following proposals came out of this particular future lab:

• Using teacher conferences in schools for distribution of reflection learning ideas
• Showing reflection learning in different schools
• Writing more reference texts and school books in reflection learning
• Carrying our regular curricula revisions
• Using Ministry of Education publication channels for information on reflection learning,
• Developing training of trainer packages,
• Setting standards in teacher training,
• Representing teacher trainers in key positions in the Ministry of Education.

Wherever I used, the Future Lab in my work life after this pioneer experience in 1992, it was always a fascinating method that brought out both intuitive-emotional capabilities as well as rational-analytical ones in all the participants and has always been a fun-way of learning, not only with vocational teachers in Germany, but also abroad in other countries and with other topics and has up until now been my favorite way of moderating learning processes in big groups of attendees!

Coming out of the peace movement in the 1980s in Germany...

...and teaching economics, social sciences and business administration in vocational colleges in the late 80s and early to mid-90s, I was always fascinated by the idea of bringing elements of peace education into my teaching in vocational colleges. The cooperation with the Institute of Peace Education at the University of Tübingen in Germany helped me to develop a simulation exercise to do exactly that, namely bringing peace education into vocational colleges by combining politics, economics and international strategic security.

POLIS was a multi-functional game that reflected the world situation politically, economically and militarily. The structure of the game was marked by the world being divided into 11 regions (Africa, Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, China, Russia, the Arabic Countries, Japan, and Oceania). Each region had a certain starting position, which was based on its present resources and its economic and military situation. Economically four goods were being produced or are found in this region: industrial products; agrarian products; energy and natural resources such as gas, oil and coal; and the potential for renewable energies.

Michael in New York, 1996

The aim of the game was to develop global and regional strategies that either allow one's own region to prosper without any other region suffering overly; or - even better - to lead the entire world into a more peaceful situation. Each region was played by a minimum of 2 players, but up to 4 players could easily play per region to fill all the roles (a politician, an economist, a military player and an opposition player trying to topple his own government). The tasks for each player were handed out before the game; present international contracts were made available to the players; a huge world map illustrated the regional economic and military situation.

Roles could change during the play when for example players start identifying too much with their own role, though. In addition, there were players to play the World Bank, the international press and the international moderators. Two moderators were needed for playing the game.

Michael in Switzerland, 1997

The game was a true simulation of the world situation and was based on an econometric estimate of the world situation. For such a complex game enough time should be allowed to play through a scenario: A minimum of 2 days was required, 3 days were better. The game was divided into phases of 2-3 hours in which specific political, economic and military decisions can be made. The consequences were discussed at the end of each round in an international round where each politician had to give a speech in front of the United Nations Security Council and defend his/her specific approach. International Committees and Conferences could be called in to discuss crises in world politics and world economics. Military conflicts could be set up and then had to be dealt with in the game.

The game gives both students and teachers a good overview of how to bring a big crowd of learners together and practice self-oriented teamwork. Various subjects are covered such as economics, international policy, German (giving speeches and negotiating) and English and French (e.g. World Bank can be played in English, Africa for example partly in French) in a truly interdisciplinary way. And of course, the overarching objective of the game was to bring the world to a more peaceful equilibrium in which disarmament and reduction of nuclear missiles lead to a more prosperous and a more egalitarian economic condition.

I played the game first as a participant in 1994 and then various times in my vocational college as well as in many others and I played it as a moderator many times from 1996 until the end of the millennium. Students were always super motivated when they came out of the game and wanted to know all about international economics, which made my life as a vocational teacher in those subjects a lot easy and much more fun!

Teachers and teacher trainers in my state in Germany liked this game so much that they started using it themselves in their respective vocational schools.

The many times I was asked to moderated POLIS simulation exercises were some of the highlights of my career as a vocational teacher, because they helped me enormously not only making my own subject of economics much more interesting to students but also helped me link this experience to other subjects and other teachers and turning it into a truly multi-dimensional learning experience.

When I meet students and teachers who attended my POLIS session even after more than 30 years they still mostly point the exceptional learning experience they have had in these weekend workshops and remember this usually as the most favorable learning moment in their entire vocational school life!

I was very happy when in early 1998...

...I was appointed Director of Vocational Teacher Training in Köln, Germany when together with other directors of vocational teacher training, I was in charge of the following duties:

• Shaping out a two-year teacher training program that built on university studies and internships and focused on the three essential pillars of cooperation, teamwork, and the use of reflection and self-reflection techniques in meeting new pedagogical, technical, commercial and information technology (IT) challenges.
• Preparing junior teachers for changing needs in labour markets and changing needs in vocational schools which led to new teacher training programs being planned and developed that were able to deal flexibly with restructuring challenges in vocational education.
• Building a legal and didactical framework that emphasized the joint role of both vocational schools and vocational education teacher training institutes in in-service teacher training and reflected on how curricula for teacher training had been revised in the light of the new requirements in vocational schools.
• Organizing in-service teacher training as a collaborative effort among schools, the vocational education teacher training institute, and junior teachers.

Michael in Berlin, 1998

• Focussing on “key qualifications”, or “essentials”, as we called them in the vocational teacher training institute which helped both junior teachers in their “labour markets” (the vocational schools), as well as vocational students after graduation in their labour markets in industry, services or agriculture.
• In taking a group and teamwork approach, the VETTI in Cologne succeeded in dropping the spoon-feeding approach in teacher training and instead helping junior teachers to take their own process of “learning-and-becoming-teachers” in their own hands and thus responding in a very effective way to the challenges in vocational education in a changing world of work.
• Emphasizing heavily on trial-runs in teaching to meet different objectives throughout a two-year program in a system that used a number of different feedback techniques that combine both theoretical and practical aspects in learning situations and which had real-life importance and were fun; and finally...
• Monitoring and evaluation mechanisms established for quality control purposes that provided useful feedback for everyone involved in the teacher training program.

Michael at home, 1998

When I look back at these two years, they were for a long time my highlights during my work like maybe eventually until I started to work on apprenticeships with the ILO after 2012.

I was always passionate about the role of vocational teacher training in my career...

...and so I was I was very happy when in early 2003 I was asked to develop a new approach in Serbia based on my national vocational teacher training experience.

The approach I selected was based on implementation of reflection learning (Handlungsorientierung in German) stretched out over a period of one year. It was delivered in three steps in a five-week program, a two-week teacher training seminar in April 20023 followed by two-week trial run teaching situations in various vocational schools in Serbia in May 2003 and finished off with a one-week teacher training seminar for future trainers in May 2004.

With vocational teachers in Serbia, 2003

The first workshop was a basic 10-day training course on reflection learning in a modular approach. The principle of reflection learning was used in a hands-on approach based on many examples from best practices of teachers in vocational schools and delivered through action-oriented methods. The four modules focussed on didactics, methods, communication techniques in class and on grading and making assessments in reflection learning situations. Participating teachers came from the 18 pilot schools of the Ministry of Education in Serbia and the German GTZ project “Reform of the VET system in Serbia”.

Michael in Serbia, 2006

The second workshop in May 2003 focussed on trial run teaching situations in 9 out of the 18 pilot schools. This took the same group of 18 participants into the day-to-day work of reflection learning lesson planning in commercial schools in Serbia. The whole workshop took place over a period of two weeks and in the morning of each day, a different school was visited and one lessen carried out by two teachers (ranging from economics, business administration, commercial correspondence and accounting to Serbian language) with the rest of the participants watching. Afterwords the lesson was discussed with the whole group.

The third workshop in took place in March 2004 and emphasized looking at additional skills for future teachers. The focus in this one-week workshop was threefold, namely to:

• Deepen the understanding of didactics for commercial lesson planning and become familiar with more didactic planning tools.
• Jointly prepare trial-run teaching situations and carry them out in schools and in micro-teaching situations (=in the presence of other teacher trainers and not in schools).
• Systematically obtain tools for evaluating, assessing and also grading trial-run teaching situations.

This vocational teacher training approach in Serbia was one that I look upon very fondly more than 20 years later and I can see that it showed me a lot about the importance for fully functional systems of vocational education and training and systematic vocational teacher training as I showed in Serbia more than 20 years ago are still one of the backbones of good VET systems in any country!

My theoretical and practical experiences...

...in working with the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in Durham North Carolina on reforms and policy advice for reforms in vocational education and training led me to the development of a model of explanation for transformation and change, which I called the butterfly model and which I presented in various conferences and to different audiences in 2005 and which I developed later as a model of thinking.

Michael at home in the US in 2005

In a butterfly with two wings, four dots, and a main body, I put the four most important categories into the four dots of the butterfly, namely social dialogue among key stakeholders, demand-driven Vocational Education and Training (VET) and labour market needs in the second dot, measurement instruments as control factors of a good and resilient system, and legislation and robust financing as the fourth pillar of a good system into the fourth dot of the butterfly.

Michael having a dilemma in 2005

Each of the four categories in the four dots would have 5-6 specific components, such as trust building in all sectors, economic assessments of sectors with growth and job potential, cost benefit analyses and proper placement of VET in the education system.

Elegant in 2005

The four dots were connected with separate things necessary to be done in connecting the four key areas, for example cooperation in curriculum development and developing self-learn competencies and implementing student-driven learning and finally the backbone of the butterfly had additional requests to resilient systems such as digitalization and developing solid teacher and director training.

Michael in Georgia in 2008

The butterfly model received wide attention in the US and was a basis of our theoretical work for systems reform in vocational education and training and workforce development. Even today I go back to it once in a while and enjoy the way I put all these elements in one model that explained the mutual dependence of all these factors on well-functioning and resilient VET systems.

I had always been fascinated with the idea of good teaching...

...and training in vocational schools/ colleges, but when I was asked to be the team leader of a team of German vocational teacher trainers in Saudi Arabia under a joint cooperation between the Governments of Saudi Arabia and Germany in 2006, I was thrilled with the idea of bringing together theoretical knowledge and skills for vocational teacher training with practical teacher training experiences in the to be built Teacher Training College (TTC) for 3000 vocational teachers in a bachelor programme in Riad, Saudi Arabia.

Michael at a market in Saudi Arabia, 2006

So, in a nutshell, in response to a request by the Government of Saudi Arabia and the General Organization for Technical Education and Vocational Training (GOTEVOT) to the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), two German expert teams drafted this Master Plan for a Trainers Training College (TTC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between March 2005 and June 2006.

Michael with a colleague in Saudi Arabia, 2006

The Master Plan gave a “blueprint” for the basic rationale for the TTC in Riyadh with 3,000 students at any time and 250 teaching personnel in six-quarter Bachelor Degree Programs. In November 2005, the first expert team presented a comprehensive Master Plan in Riyadh consisting of three different approaches:

• a pedagogical approach.
• a staffing concept, and
• an outline for buildings and equipment.

The overall approach for the TTC consisted of basic pillars in General Studies, Mathematics and Science, Vocational Pedagogy, Applied Vocational Pedagogy, Vocational and Company Field Practice, Vocational Discipline and a Bachelor Degree Thesis.

It brought together best practice and latest developments in trainers’ education and vocational teacher training from Germany emphasizing reflection learning, project work, work and business process related learning, competence-development oriented learning, trial-run teaching situations, micro teaching, self-organized learning and new and innovative teaching methods.

This Master Plan held detailed outlines for curricula in a variety of different Bachelor Degree Programs in 6 different vocational fields (Automotive Technology, Communication and Computer Technology, Construction Technology, Electrical Technology, Management Technology, Metal Technology and HVAC Technology). Each of the different Bachelor Degree programs was described in great detail and included study plans and overviews as well as outlines for examination and certification procedures for each individual program. The Master Plan was later in 2009 implemented with the support of GIZ – IS and I became the Senior Adviser in the implementation.

During the world-wide youth unemployment situation between 2010 and 2015...

...the International Labour Organization was asked to assist in developing tools and advising on means to improve youth employment. I was in the position to head a team of ILO specialists to prepare seminars, workshops and youth academies together with my colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland and in Turin, Italy.

In 2010, during a presentation in Yemen

Quality apprenticeships were advocated as a means to advocate youth employment and as a tri-partite organization (representing governments through Ministries of Labour, employers and workers’ organizations) the ILO organized international apprenticeship workshops world-wide.

My colleague Alessandra Molz at the ILO Training Centre in Turin, Italy designed the tri-partite role play and we jointly played the game many times between 2013 and 2018 in different countries and in different workshop settings.

The idea behind this half-day role play was very simple: The Vice-President of Saturnia, a fictitious country is concerned about high youth unemployment and intends to convene a tri-partite Task Force that will be responsible for setting up an apprenticeship system for young people in Saturnia. Participants of the workshop have received an invitation from the Office of the Vice President in Saturnia to participate in the first Task Force meeting with a number of questions to be addressed. The Task Force consists of the Minister of Labour and his delegations, representatives from the national employers’ organization and representatives from the main national trade unions. For each of the groups there is a role card that describes what to do.

Since I always had mixed groups in ILO workshops composed of real government representatives and real ones from the employers and the trade union side, we let the real government representatives play the employers in the role play, the real employers had to play the trade union position in the role play and the real trade unionists played the government in the role play.

In 2017, in ILO in Geneva

This change of perspective was difficult at first for many participants but lead to a much better understanding of the position of the other social partners and following the role play – as in the case of Costa Rica once – ended in renewed negotiations about the national law behind introducing apprenticeships systems in Costa Rica.

I should say that this role play was one of the most effective ways of getting decision makers to understand the role and interests of others in apprenticeships and created not only fun and laughter in the half-day exercise which was led by me as Vice President of Saturnia, but most always was the starting point for real further consultations at the national level, very often supported by myself and the ILO teams in various countries!

I remember coming back from Germany in early March 2020...

...with already first cases of COVID 19 infected people in my home country, when my whole work life in Uruguay all of a sudden changed in my last year of service for the International Labour Organization, and we were all of sudden stuck at home with our laptops facing a lock down and absolutely no more work in our ILO office for about a whole year!

How wrong was I when I had thought about taking an easy last year before my retirement with a few workshops and seminars for ILO CINTERFOR (the ILO network on vocational education and training institutions in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean) and finishing off my legacy as the guy who would run seminars with government representatives, employers and trade unions in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Belize, Jamaica and elsewhere in the region. From one day to the next in March 2020 there was no more traveling, because nobody could leave nor enter Uruguay, the country in which I was based.

In 2019, Doctorate in Freiburg

A couple of us in ILO CINTERFOR had the idea to organize workshops and seminars in online courses, but little did I know how that difficult that was to come up with new exercises, new tasks and new ways of inspiring people in zoom conferences! Fortunately, my team was motivated enough to enter into a new phase of courses, including my flagship course on quality apprenticeships in Latin America and the Caribbean!

Michael in Paraguay in 2019

I must admit that I learned a lot during the preparation time from July through October 2020 and then finally when we ran the first online course on quality apprenticeships in November and December 2020. I was so proud that we would be able to motivate more than 30 people to stay with us through 7 intensive weeks of course work, of homework and of consultations in various sub groups. One of the highlights of the online course was when we played the role play on quality apprenticeships with all participating people in their individual homes in Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Argentina and we got the people to have fun and to start thinking creatively about the time when they would be able to move around freely again after the pandemic and start negotiating quality apprenticeship systems face to face among government representatives, employers and workers.

Michael played the Vice President of Saturnia in the role play game in 2020

Finally, I should say that it was a good and rewarding way out of my intense work life that I had led over more than 50 years and I was happy to hand over the course to my colleagues in ILO CINTERFOR, who up until today, keep repeating and running this very online course in Spanish and in English versions for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean!

Michael's retirement party in Germany, 2021

I am sitting here at my desk and have just finished writing the 12 stories about my work life in my new home in Gummersbach in Germany.

After my retirement in 2021, I did some work in Nigeria and in Georgia and I have carried out some consulting here from my office in Germany for colleagues from the World Bank, for the Swiss Development Cooperation, for DANIDA, and for GIZ and I also accompanied some study tours of colleagues from different countries into the German “landscape” of vocational education and training. I decided last year that I will do no more consulting and finally get closure of the work I did in my life. This decision makes me happy and it feels good.

In 2021, I met the love of my life and we have been together since then. This year we got married and we both have a lot of the same interests and hobbies, such as sports, dancing, travelling, visiting museums and making music. It feels wonderful to have Annelie in my life now and I wished I had met her much earlier.

Michael in Lisbon in 2021

Some people write biographies at the end of their work lives, I decided to update my website with these 12 stories and I hope that some of the people who have known me, might come here and have a look at what Michael did in his life, where he came from, what shaped him and what he stood for.

I have completed this work also for my family, in particular for my two sons, who both have their own fulfilled work life now, since they are in their early and mid 30s and I assume who never really had a clue of what their father was doing during their adolescence, when he was trying to let them grow, both spiritually and financially, into the wonderful people they are now.

Michael skiing in Austria in 2022

These biographical notes here on my site are also written for my grandchild, who at one point might come and have a look at what his Opa was involved in when he himself was not even born.

Finally, I would like to thank all the people I was fortunate enough to meet during my work life and especially those who were my colleagues and later became my friends.

Michael at Perrito Moreno in Argentina in 2025

In particular, I am very grateful to my wife Annelie, who has turned me into a very happy man in my old age and who is not only my wife and companion, but also my best friend!

The school year 2003/2004 is in progress and I have been analysing every single minute of my class as I have never done before.

Have I motivated my students for their assignments? Are the examples I have been using suitable for their age? Have I attained the aim of the class? I often wonder if I learned enough during the seminars. I think I did, at least for the beginning. Do I need more "theoretical knowledge" besides my experience? Perhaps I do, since these things cannot be separated!

My school is among 18 schools which participated in the pilot programme ´business administrator´. This programme was supported by the Ministry of Education and Sport, as well as GTZ, the German Technical Cooperation, an organization for technical collaboration. A series of seminars were organized for the teachers of these schools. I attended the seminar managed by Mr. Michael Axmann./p>

The seminar consisted of 3 parts.

1. April 1st – April 13th, 2003. ´Theoretical part´ which definitely was not long-winded presentation.
2. May 12th – 23th, 2003. A visit to 9 schools in which we gave lectures we prepared in advance.
3. March 15-19, 2004. A part focusing on strengthening our ability to plan, analyse and assess lessons.

The participants of the seminar were mostly professors of vocational, economic subjects.

Being a professor in mathematics and not being accustomed to the exact content of the seminar, I was worried whether I would be able to fit in since it was not "my field".

The aim of the theoretical part of the seminar was achieving the desired results through work. Each workday was divided into 4 parts, each lasted 90 minutes. In the first 15 minutes of each part we listened to the introductory part of the lecturer. He would set a particular problem, then at least one method referring to the work with students, and the remaining part was for us. We experienced things which we did not expect. No one told us how to activate students – we were activated ourselves!

We were divided into groups trying to work out the solution of a particular problem. We realized that it was easier to work in groups or at least, in pairs although in our schools we were taught to work individually. All the time I expected evaluation of our work and further instructions (such as ´try something else´, ´it is better if you´, ´perhaps you should´). In the first couple of days I thought that our work was not graded because we were not accustomed to a new situation, but later I realized that we were not supposed to be graded at all. The point is that we have to find a solution ourselves, to estimete what is good and what is bad in our work, to find a way to active teaching.

That is why I found the second part of the seminar well-organized and interesting.It was a sort of checking of what we had learned. Once again, we were divided into pairs, according to our interests. We were given several weeks to prepare a class and to perform it in front of the students. As we had expected, it turned out to be the most difficult!

Where should we start from? Although I have had a lot of experience in teaching, I had problems in choosing the appropriate topic and adopting it to knowledge and abilities of the students. After the class everything seemed to be much easier. We had 9 classes in 9 towns. Each class was analysed. I think I learned most in the second part of the seminar. First of all, I learned to listen to the others, to hear about their impressions of the classes.

Although the participants of the seminar were not familiar with the content of my class (because of the subject I teach), they were able to follow my teaching. The same thing happened to me during their classes. There were a lot of suggestions how to improve a class, to approach a new working method or a topic.There were some objections too, but they were well-intended. No one expected to give a perfect class. We are aware that in Germany one has to study two more years after they graduate in order to become a professor.

I would also like to mention the problem of grading and modular teaching .I sometimes still have difficulties with the first one, but we did not discuss this problem in detail since we ran out of time. Modular teaching is not regulated by law in our country. However, I think it is a very important prerequisite for successful implementation and application of active teaching.

I did my teacher training from 1998-2000 in Cologne.

Among others, Michael Axmann was one of my teacher trainers (Fachseminarleiter). Teacher training in Cologne was certainly interesting if not always the way you expected it to be. This is one of the things typical for the Cologne institute – unconventional methods. Before I came there I expected to be trained in different teaching methods, provided with a lot of “tricks” and good advice. What I found was questions with no one providing answers but myself.

IThis might sound unpedagogical, but what at the beginning seemed arbitrary, turned out to have a method behind it indeed. You had to find your own way. No one ever told you that what you did was good or bad – they just provided help in analyzing yourself. The very first week, for example, felt more like a course in psychology than in didactics. We were asked to make ourselves the subject of discussion by analyzing our “biography”. What the hell does that have to do with teaching, I thought. Well, I can tell you. Knowing yourself, knowing your reactions towards people, knowing how you yourself behaved as a pupil, knowing your innermost strengths and weaknesses – all that makes you acknowledge the kind of teacher you are and enables you to define your role as a teacher.

The courses were divided into “Hauptseminare” (main seminars concentrating on basic didactic work without referring to any special school subjects) and so-called “Fachseminare” (subject-related seminars providing information about certain didactic approaches for the specific subject, e.g. business studies). The good thing about the main seminars was, that we were free to choose from a variety of topics. In that way, everyone had the possibility to choose something meeting his/her specific needs, e.g. if you felt you needed to learn something about how to handle classroom conflicts, then you would choose the corresponding course. As you met different teacher-trainees and teacher trainers every other month or so, the main seminars not only offered a wide range of topics but also a wide range of people to discuss with and to learn from.

The subject-related seminars were quite another matter, but nonetheless very instructive. They kind of got down to the core of it. If the things discussed in the main seminar often sounded vague and you didn’t really know how to put them into practice at school, the subject-related seminars offered help in doing so. Of course, none of the seminars would have been of any use without the daily work at school. With the help of experienced teachers who we were allowed to observe during class and who watched us doing our first steps in classroom, I became continually more experienced and self-confident.

But again here, as in the seminars, it was mostly a question of your own initiative whether you learnt 57 something or not. You had to find teachers to tutor you, you had to make them watch and discuss your lessons – all extra work not included in the teacher’s salary. I was lucky to have found at least three teachers of that kind who accompanied me throughout my teacher training and whose feedback was invaluable to my learning process.

Communication between the junior teachers was regarded as highly important by the Cologne institute; so we were asked to form peer groups of three to six in order to discuss classroom matters. Those peer groups were not tutored or supervised by anyone; it was purely a matter of self-steered learning by exchanging experiences and discussing problems arising in school.

Although it had a compulsory touch behind it, I quite liked the idea of being together with peers. It was comforting and reassuring to find out that they had similar problems. The peer groups provided room for discussing such matters and finding solutions to them. The last thing I would like to mention are a couple of special projects that were offered during the two years of teacher training. Some were compulsory, others on a voluntary basis.

There was a “pedagogical week” toward the end of the second year with all kinds of workshops, a ski-holiday focusing on group dynamics, a so-called “future workshop/scenario?” together with pupils and teachers of a vocational school and many other activities. I preferred the special projects to the regular seminars because they offered facilities the Cologne institute could not offer.

The future workshop/scenario for example, was much more instructive than the theoretical seminars because it was a “real” situation with pupils and teachers, not a constructed situation. Also, during most projects, the atmosphere between junior teachers and tutors was quite a different one. It was a good chance to get to know each other and also find out some personal details both from fellow trainees and tutors

Summing up I can say that those two years of teacher training provided me with invaluable information for my further career. It was not what I expected it to be in the beginning and I know that many fellow teachers were not quite content with the methodological approach of the seminars. For many (and at times also for me) there was a certain lack of input.

Most courses consisted mainly of discussions and analyses of certain classroom situations while there were only little tips on how to manage them. Being a junior teacher in the Cologne institute required the ability to work independently as well as a potential for self-analysis and “self steering”. But only in that way was I able to find my “professional self”.