Mission Statement and Vision between Tradition & Innovation

In Austria, the Institute for Business Education at WU Wien has the longest tradition. In the 1950s and 60s, Hans Krasensky, the founder of Austrian Business Education, headed the first Austrian chair at the former Hochschule für Welthandel. However, it should be noted that school teachers for economy-related subjects before had been trained by business administration chairs since the 1920s.

The philosophy of business education at WU Wien is based on the two poles/pillars of tradition and innovation. Building on our business education tradition, we train Wirtschaftspädagog:innen who are experts in

• sophisticatedly planning,

• successfully implementing,

• carefully reflecting and

• creating future-oriented and innovative

teaching and learning processes on economy-related topics - business administration and economics - in both, schools and education in the workplace.

Even though the training is considerably designed for teaching at Austrian secondary schools, we impart skills based on sound business administration knowledge that also qualify graduates for a wide range of professional activity in a business context (human resource development, conslting professions, in-company training and continuing education).

With a broadly diversified portfolio of skills, we create the following professional options for our BE graduates:

• vocational school system

• corporate education and human resources

• continuing education in a private and public sector workplace

• education management and edcuational policy

• consulting professions Berufe

As a result, our graduates will continue to have excellent opportunities on the job market in the future - just as they have in recent decades.

Multidisciplinarity & Mindset

Due to the nature of our work, we have an interdisciplinary approach and act as a mediatorial gateway/interface between the topics of

• economic sciences,

• education science/didactics and

• psychology.

This interdisciplinary orientation is documented in all fundamental fields of activity of our institute: in research, teaching, and teacher training or continuing education.

Due to our capacity as Institute for Business Education, teaching is more important to us than in other "regular" business administration chairs. It is therefore not only a major didactic challenge in tertiary education, but also an interesting field of research for us.

We attach great importance to the relationship between theory and practice and the goal of professional training of teachers according to the principle of polyvalence - for both, a service in schools and the business world.

We strive to combine sound scientific (economic) knowledge, which is partly based on the core curriculum of the Sektion für Berufs- und Wirtschaftspädagogik, with professional competency - namely the can do. We have operationalized this competencies in our BE Master Program Standards.

At the same time, we see the realization of pedagogically appropriate interaction with students - keyword relationship culture - as the foundation of our teacher training ... while simultaneously putting into practice clear and transparent performance requirements at the subject level.