Lisa Wintersberg, one of the Professorships Research Associates, attended the scholarship program for Bavarian and Israeli early career researchers in September 2023 and had a research visit of one month to Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel.
In line with her research endeavor, she planned to experience a shift in her perspective and view on her research topic during her stay. This was crucial to generalize the findings she had collected in a case study in the field of lifelong learning and training of technical professionals. She discovered that while research tries to understand how technical professionals can be trained most effectively in the industry, research findings still need to be put into practice. This gap was the starting point for a case study of a company´s training department in the manufacturing sector.
In Israel, she visited another manufacturing company and experienced a whole new working and training environment, receiving the change in perspective she aimed for with this trip. She could benefit from the learnings of experts in the field of training and development. Together with the persons in charge of HR and training and development, she identified common ground on the importance of automated processes, close cooperation and involvement of project members for training matters, sustainable learning through continuous teaching and testing, learning needs, training access, and perception of learning. They also discovered differences in the training approaches, training formats, and working processes. In addition to this company visit, this scholarship program gave her the opportunity to concentrate on intensive literature review, data collection, and analysis.
Summarizing the stay, the scholarship program was beneficial a) for her research due to the discussions about her findings with experts and b) for her personally, as she gained insights into the working culture of one Israeli company and, thus, experiencing Israel in a way which is not possible as a tourist.