Flexible education without having to travel to and from traditional seminars - webinars offer many advantages, which are more than ever in demand in the current Corona pandemic. Especially within companies learning skills in digital form plays an increasingly important role to ensure long-term success. Accordingly, the fischer Group of Companies relies on webinars in addition to face-to-face training. These can be called up anytime and anywhere.

"Via webinars we provide our various business units with optimum support during market launches in order to convey the technical know-how on new products to our national companies and importers", explains Frank Neltner, Head of fischer academy. “The main idea is to make a product introduction interesting, credible and sustainable in the long term.” fischer academy trainer Stefan Huber has been involved in the "Digital Live Training" project since 2018 and explains: "We strive to bring the webinars to a similar level as our face-to-face trainings. This includes that we as trainers explain and assemble the product just as we do in an on-site training. Individual questions of the participants are answered directly.” That way the experts set standards in terms of “digital empathy”.

In addition, extensive know-how of fischer’s international academy network was incorporated into the concept. The network consists of trainers and importers across all 49 national companies. For the webinars’ implementation fischer also worked together with vitero, a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute, which provides the technical framework for the fixing specialist's online training courses. The trainers explain and install the product during the live seminars, highlighting the most important features, advantages and benefits for the customer. They also outline the product’s added value and compare it to competitors’ products.

Each digital training session concludes with a memorable event, such as the loud splitting of a wooden beam or the crash of a child’s swing during a demonstration of incorrect installation. This captures the viewers’ attention, ensuring they will remember the training session until the very last second. This approach has also convinced the expert jury. “The innovative implementation of the webinar format was the reason why we presented the eLearning Award in the “webinar” category to the fischer Group of Companies and the associated service provider vitero GmbH“, the jury said, explaining its decision.

Digitalized training services are an important milestone of the “New fischer academy” project, whose aim is to create a long-term and globally harmonised fischer academy network that guarantees the same quality of training all around the globe. Winning the 2020 eLearning Award has shown that the fischer Group of Companies has taken the right approach. Encouraged by this success, the next step is to expand the webinar offering to external customer groups. Initially, specialist seminars will be held on the internet for structural designers and engineers from German-speaking Europe, with internal and external fischer experts giving lectures and answering participants' questions live. This is followed by the English language equivalent for participants from all over the world.