In the end, everyone was a little surprised by how well it went. “I didn’t expect that we would have so many ideas and be so productive in such a short time,” says Marleen Stollberg. The 17-year-old took time out between her written and oral school-leaving exams to attend the VDE dialog workshop in Offenbach. One weekend in May, Marleen was joined in the conference room of a hotel on the River Main by seven other young people who had come to help the VDE dialog editorial team plan a special edition focusing on young talent. Although VDE dialog regularly reports on the shortage of skilled workers and the lack of young talent in the pipeline, this is the first edition to be explicitly aimed at and developed by young people themselves.
The editorial team invited a selection of young people representative of the target readership: people with an interest in technical professions but unsure where their career path will take them, who are looking for the right place to study and who may be persuaded to work toward a future in one of the many fields of electrical engineering and information technology.