Absenteeism and sick leave are a growing challenge across many companies. This is also visible in the daily training environment in retail. Absences can arise from various factors, such as physical strain, stress, health issues, or personal challenges outside of work.

When apprentices are absent, this not only creates operational gaps but also leads to missed learning opportunities in everyday work. At the same time, employee well-being and high-quality training are key prerequisites for stable teams and successful collaboration.

This challenge focuses on companies in the telecommunications sector with several hundred employees, particularly in shop and sales environments. In these settings, daily operations depend heavily on service quality, staff availability, and direct customer interaction.

When apprentices are absent at short notice, shifts must be reorganized spontaneously, team workload increases, and pressure on remaining employees rises further.

At the same time, valuable learning moments are lost. A large part of retail training takes place directly on the job—through customer interactions, team collaboration, and hands-on experience. When these phases are missed, not only labor capacity is lost, but also critical development opportunities for apprentices.

Existing measures such as health programs, workshops, or individual tools often address the issue only selectively and are not sufficiently integrated into daily routines.

This is where the challenge begins: We are looking for solutions that address stress and workload early, sustainably reduce absenteeism, and at the same time strengthen the development of apprentices within the company.

Note
This contest is part of the InnoVET-PLUS research project InnoHubAzubi and is carried out in cooperation with apprentices from German vocational schools.

Please submit your contribution in both German and English. If you do not speak German, you may use machine translation for the German version.