Learning under real conditions

It is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to find good young talent for the rapidly changing tasks in marketing and communication departments. Students, on the other hand, are looking for early contact with companies and practical tasks. For this reason, Kresse & Discher, an agency for cross-media brand communication, started an initiative together with the Bundesverband Mittelständische Wirtschaft (BVMW) ( Federal Association of Small and Medium-Sized Business es) to network companies and students.

The initiative called WYSIWYG is intended to bring students together with companies as well as with the field of "marketing" or "communication" already during their studies. Both sides can get to know each other in the course of the project work - according to the motto "Who you see is who you get".

The first WYSIWYG Sprint at Fulda University of Applied Sciences has now also started in the winter semester 2019/2020. The companies Eckes-Granini and Vorwerk called for real projects from practice, which the students work on under real pitch conditions as part of an elective course. The elective is supervised by Prof. Dr. Viola. The students initially received detailed briefings from the companies and are continuously coached by Prof. Dr. Viola, Dr. Stephan Tiersch and Petra Keller from Kresse & Discher. In order to create real competitive conditions, the work is currently being done in randomly assembled teams. The proposed solutions will be presented by the students to the clients Eckes-Granini and Vorwerk Kobold in February. In order to prepare the students in the best possible way for the presentation in the participating companies, all participating students also received exclusive business etiquette training from Maggie Diebel(board member of the German Etiquette Society). Finally, all participating students are rewarded with a WYSIWYG certificate of participation at the end.

(Author: Janine Koch)