Small and medium-sized enterprises are currently under great pressure: some markets and technologies are changing rapidly, there is a shortage of skilled workers and the workforce is becoming more diverse. SMEs often have a strong corporate culture and great adaptability - but these strengths have hardly been used in a targeted manner to date. The project aims to show how companies can make better use of their culture and the experience of their employees in order to remain resilient in the long term.
In four companies from different sectors, employees, teams and the entire organization will learn how to deal better with difficult situations. With the support of researchers, they will develop and test methods to specifically strengthen their own resilience. Experiences and stories from everyday working life are collected and reflected on in interviews, triad discussions, workshops and team development. The measures are tested for their impact and adapted. At the same time, we are testing whether and how digital tools can help. The results will be disseminated via publications, training courses and digital learning opportunities.
The project uses the invisible side of knowledge and culture in organizations. It reconstructs individual and collective processes of creating meaning. To this end, it transfers analog and digital methods from social and work sciences into practical applications in everyday working life. If successful, a systematic approach and concrete interventions for reflecting on and strengthening one's own corporate culture will be available for the first time. They can be used in science, consulting and self-application.
The joint project (total budget 2,076,000 euros) is funded in the "Future of Work" funding program as part of the "Future of Value Creation - Research on Production, Services and Work" research program and co-financed by the ESF.
This text was translated with DeepL on 07/04/2026

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As a continuation of the "BWB:konkret" project, "ALL:konkret" also strives for an inductive description of the reality of in-company continuing education. In ethnographic company visits lasting several weeks, data, documents and information not pre-structured by hypotheses are collected, for example through work shadowing, participatory observations, individual and group interviews or the analysis of documents. The data collected is analyzed in joint research workshops and fed into further phases of data collection and evaluation. The results of this circular research process are case-specific organizational analyses that reveal the individual specifics of an organization's in-company continuing education reality and make them open to discussion both for research and for the personnel and organizational development of the organizations under investigation. The organizational analyses are also reflected upon in joint workshops with the organizations studied. The objectives are as follows:

• Reconstruction of structures, strategies, organizational forms, technologies of corporate learning (system perspective)
• Reconstruction of meaningful motives, effective theories, contradictory requirements for action and cooperation in the practice of continuing education in the workplace (actor perspective)
• Reconstruction of historical lines of development, of conditional cycles, decision-making processes and the interlocking of in-company continuing education with external and societal processes (process perspective)
• Extraction of criteria for quality and professionalism of non-formal continuing education in company contexts
• Organizational and professional theoretical classification of in-company continuing education
• Development of a scheme for surveying company learning cultures and educational practice
• Development of conceptual approaches and action strategies for the further development of an innovative continuing education policy
• Didactic preparation of the case studies for teaching purposes in the scientific education and training of educational staff

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