Building blocks for further training
The new WISTA Academy strives to facilitate access to talent and employee retention for companies
To WISTA, commercial location development is more than plotting land, managing buildings and attracting businesses. It’s also about creating spaces for people to live and work—and to inspire them. After all, success can only be sustained with satisfied employees. To make it easier for businesses to access and retain talent, WISTA Management GmbH is expanding the training offerings to its resident companies and research institutes with the new WISTA Academy.
Although the title of ‘Head of Human Resources, Organisation, Quality Management’ seems fairly straightforward, in Bessie Fischer-Bohn’s case, there’s a whole cosmos behind it. A cosmos teeming with networks, cross-connections, and contacts to companies, research institutes, public and private universities—and, more recently and increasingly, the German Federal Employment Agency (BA). The latter is one of the cooperation partners for a new project that Fischer-Bohn is pushing forward together with her colleague Benjamin Springer: the new WISTA Academy.
Springer is the head project manager. However, he leaves no doubt as to how important his extremely well-networked colleague is for this forward-looking project. Fischer-Bohn connects with teachers, drives network building forward between the Academy and the WISTA sites in Adlershof and elsewhere in Berlin, and explores the qualification needs of the diverse stakeholders on-site in the spirit of feedback with practical application. For that, she doesn’t even have to travel much. She represents WISTA in numerous steering committees and working groups, in which she learns about what moves the industry and research first-hand. The shortage of skilled workers is almost an evergreen issue now. “The issue of talent development and of how we can support our resident companies in attracting and retaining talent has been firmly anchored in our strategy for years,” she says. As a technology park operator, WISTA sees it as a key task to provide the best-possible support to the businesses on-site. In addition to accessing talent, the skills development of their employees is an increasingly pivotal issue for companies of all sizes.
The discussion about this led to the founding of a skilled labour network whose steering board includes both the BA and WISTA, represented by Bessie Fischer-Bohn, in addition to several resident companies. The steering board is the nucleus of the new Academy. All the participants realised the extent to which they could help each other out. The focus of the BA has shifted over the years, moving away from managing mass unemployment towards providing more proactive services to employers, offering support to businesses seeking and developing high-skilled workers. “Our interests are almost congruent. What we were missing, was an active arm,” she says.
This active arm is now growing in the form of WISTA Academy. The first courses took place in the autumn of last year. But they are only the beginning. “We seek to cluster the qualification schemes and the course content based on the interests of the companies,” explains Benjamin Springer. The target groups include start-ups but also medium-sized companies, which are increasingly having problems meeting demands due to a lack of staff, or companies who have been managing new ways of working together in hybrid teams since the pandemic. Digitalisation as well as an increasing use of artificial intelligence are creating a demand for further training in many businesses. “We are collecting all these topics—and will curate a good programme from them,” he says. The topics are as diverse as they are pressing for many businesses, whether they deal with questions of onboarding of new employees, making good use of the new Skilled Immigration Act, self-confident presentations in groups, or opportunities for strengthening employer brands to stand out in the competition for talent. A format that has been well-established since its inception in September is the event series ‘Lectern’. Once a month, select experts give keynote speeches and discuss them with an audience.
Fischer-Bohn and her valuable networks again came into play when the programme was set up. She had contacts to the new bbw University of Applied Sciences or the Steinbeis University in Adlershof, to nearby HTW Berlin – University of Applied Sciences, or Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where one can find fitting expertise on virtually any topic. The advantage of WISTA Academy: It will offer qualifications directly on the site, which will soon also be officially certified for the participants—and adjustable to the specific demands of individual companies. “It's conceivable that in the future, they will book entire series of courses with us, in which they can develop qualified professionals, course by course, without the need for constant travel and without neglecting their social contacts,” she explains. These types of programmes can make both companies and their business locations more attractive. WISTA views the Academy as another building block to realise a holistic understanding of commercial location development.
Peter Trechow for Adlershof Journal