MACH2 event - the future at your fingertips

200 pupils met twelve strong partners from business and society. Last Friday's MACH2 Future Conference at the Association of German Banks in Berlin featured rousing keynotes, interesting workshops, impulses and discussions on future skills, artificial intelligence and digitalization, sustainability and financial education, personal development and future courage for young people.

Why MACH2 - and how it came about

To whet young people's appetite for the future and motivate them to take their lives into their own hands!” - this is how Sarah Schmidtke, Head of Society and Banks at the Association of German Banks, described the aim of the initiative in her welcome address. Klaas Wiggers, a teacher at Willms-Gymnasium in Delmenhorst, had the good idea. With his enthusiasm and his credo: “Young people need future skills and optimism about the future, young people seek and deserve participation and appreciation”, he infected many others and won them over to the idea of the Future Conference.

The result was a group of well-known organizations from the education sector, large technology and communications companies, foundations and other institutions that developed this event together: Accenture, Airbus, Association of German Banks, Berlin Cosmopolitan School and others - they all contributed time, money, manpower and expertise and provided a diverse range of framework and workshops.

Future skills for the young generation

Accordingly, the students were able to choose from a variety of great offers throughout the day: How can I benefit from experience abroad? How do I prepare for an application? How can I make the right decisions? What do I need to know about money? How can I stay strong and resilient despite stress? What does sustainability mean? Which apprenticeships offer prospects? How do I found a start-up? How does AI work? And much more.

Even before that, there was a great motivational program for the students: Ronja Ebeling, GenZ expert and founder of TEAM OF TOMORROW, used exciting survey figures to show a picture of the mood of today's youth, encouraged the young people to shape their future and underlined the importance of social skills today more than ever. “You can have great ideas in your job,” she said, “but you can usually only implement them if you manage to convince others of them.”

Another special highlight was the appearance of the reigning European and World Team Archery Champion Katharina Bauer. The Olympic participant at last year's Olympic Games contrasted her great sporting successes with her defeats and setbacks in her career in such an open and authentic way that she gave the audience real goosebumps. Her clear message: don't give up, even if things don't work out. Decide for yourself what success means to you and keep your eyes firmly on your goal!

Joy of discussion in the Open Spaces

In the afternoon, there were two exciting open spaces in the plenary session. Tobias Luthe from Atlantik-Brücke led the discussion on the topic of “War & Peace”, which focused in particular on the threat to democracy worldwide as well as shared values and current differences with the USA. Many of the students' contributions expressed concern that global conflicts could continue to “escalate”, that democracy, which had previously been taken for granted, could “topple over” and that the “division of society” could increase. The lively discussion made it clear how much young people are concerned about these issues and that they have very clear positions on them.

The discussion on the topic of “AI & the future”, which was introduced by Max Landefeld from the Fraunhofer Institute and moderated together with Klaas Wiggers, was no less lively. The panelists agreed that artificial intelligence offers enormous opportunities for both individuals and society as a whole. However, there was also an equally clear call to take the dangers that AI could pose to individual and social freedom seriously and to enforce binding rules to curb such threats.

Great interest in financial education

For us as the Association of German Banks, it was particularly pleasing to see that young people not only state in our surveys that they are interested in financial education, but that this was also clearly confirmed empirically: all three workshops on “Money & Finance” were fully booked in no time at all. The interest in the topic, as workshop leader Andrea Grabner from the banking association reported, was huge and the motivation of the young people “very infectious”.

The fantastic commitment of our partner school, the Berlin Cosmopolitan School, also deserves special mention. Pupils from this school introduced topics to the conference in advance, the school band ‘Pink Vamps’ provided musical accompaniment to the event and numerous volunteers, our scouts, provided active support throughout the day.

What remains?

One co-organizer from the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce put it this way: "If we give young people the space to talk about the future - then they show us that they are ready to shape it themselves. And another from Airbus: "A great event! This is how the connection between young people, schools and business can work. I take the following messages with me: “Take control of your life”, “I can't grow without failure”, “Be your own boss” and “I determine my own successes”. - There is no better way to sum it up!

The Bankers Association would like to thank all cooperation partners for their commitment - corporate citizenship at its best! - and wishes the MACH2 future event itself a bright future, i.e. many more conferences of this kind throughout Germany!