40 Years of Success: The Story of Giessen General and its Creative Approach to Education

The labor market, schools and the social structure of the region have changed significantly since 1983. This also applies to the Institute for Vocational and Social Pedagogy (ibs), which was founded at the time. The private training provider has been able to assert itself on the market for 40 years because it reacts creatively and flexibly to challenges and at the same time is a reliable cooperation partner.

The early pioneers and the managing director of today are happy about their proud anniversary.

How do I approach a youngster who has always had a horror of math? Who sits unmotivated in a course and has experienced all his life that he is not good enough? Ibs managing director Katja Ernst describes a “classic” that the former management team Dr. Elke Zimmerman and Dr. know Fedor Weiser well. Young people without school qualifications and without professional prospects have always been one of the main target groups of the Institute for Vocational and Social Pedagogy.

»Everyone is picked up where they are«, this pedagogical mantra is not only a theoretical model for the educational institution, but also lived practice. In order to reach people who have fallen by the wayside in the regular education system, you need individual attention, creative solutions and competent employees who do their job with passion, explains Ernst. These components have apparently been right over the past decades, otherwise the ibs would not be able to celebrate its 40th anniversary next week. Apparently, the concepts with which the training provider had to convince their clients – primarily the employment agency, the job center, charitable organizations and municipalities – to decide in their favor were also right.

The ibs has developed from a small two-woman operation into a company with 130 employees and a dozen freelancers at three locations (Giessen, Friedberg, Büdingen). One of the institute’s strengths is that it has positioned itself broadly in good time, says Weiser, who worked for the ibs from 1995 to 2020. It was a kind of “well-stocked general store.” This shop actually has a lot on offer: there are a variety of courses and courses in the field of professional qualification and professional development, there is language support and integration, coaching and application management. What the ibs offers always reflects the current political and social situation: In the early years, explains Weiser, many late resettlers came, in the mid-2010s numerous Syrian and currently a large number of Ukrainian refugees.

For the educational institution, the changing requirements mean that they have to develop tailor-made offers quickly and flexibly. “It’s a challenge, but it’s also what makes the work so appealing,” says Managing Director Ernst. An example of a creative solution was a qualification measure in nursing some time ago. When it was determined that graduates in outpatient care would not get very far without a driver’s license in the truest sense of the word, the acquisition of a driver’s license was organized at the same time. Such experiments are not always successful, but without “trial and error” there is no success.

Vital jumpstart

One of the current challenges is comprehensive digitization both within the company and in the range of courses offered. The beginnings of the institute didn’t have much in common with today’s digitized »general store«. The managing directors Dr. Elke Zimmermann and Hildegard Pollak founded the ibs in 1983 because they wanted to create a counterbalance to the less serious educational institutions that were springing up at the time. The background was that at that time the employment office – today the employment agency – awarded integration measures to independent providers on a large scale in order to combat the increasing number of unemployed. Most of the providers did not last long, but ibs stayed. The start was extremely modest, Zimmermann recalls: The office was the private kitchen, the bosses paid the same salary as the course instructors and all business was done on the typewriter. While Pollak left in 1990, Zimmermann managed the ibs for 38 years, and it became her life’s work.

However, it has by no means only been uphill over the years. “We’ve passed through a few troughs,” says Weiser. The year 2006 was a hard time when the institute was not able to offer its pre-employment training courses for young people because the advertisement was unsuccessful. At that time, management was forced to lay off employees. Weiser: “That was incredibly difficult for us.”

In the period that followed, the ibs recovered. In the years since it was founded, thousands of young people and adults have attended courses and seminars. Not all of them were successful, but for many the ibs was a vital starting aid.

And it is this certainty that motivates employees. When the frustrated teenager, for whom math was always a horror, finally manages to graduate from secondary school, it is a great sense of achievement for everyone involved. That was the case in 1983 and has remained so to this day.