Since 1 March, Jun. Prof. Dr Paula Protsch holds the junior professorship for "Methods of Social Science Research in Vocational Education and Training (VET)" at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology of the WiSo Faculty (ISS) of the University of Cologne. On behalf of the entire faculty, Dean Ulrich Thonemann now welcomed Paula Protsch to WiSo. The appointment was made jointly with the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB).
With the joint appointment of Dr. Paula Protsch, the WiSo Faculty of the University of Cologne and the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) are continuing their long-standing cooperation. For the second time, BIBB had established a junior professorship at the WiSo Faculty of the University of Cologne, with a focus on social science methods. The appointment is made jointly and according to the so-called Jülich model: Prof. Paula Protsch will be employed at BIBB and released for teaching duties at the University of Cologne.
"I am very impressed by the outstanding teaching and research profile of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne. I also greatly appreciate the research conducted by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, the promotion of young researchers in the graduate programme and the information services and practical VET work at BIBB. I am therefore particularly pleased to be a bridge-building member of both organisations. I see it as my central task within the framework of the junior professorship to strengthen and further advance established collaborations," says junior professor Protsch.
At the University of Cologne, Professor Protsch will be teaching courses at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology. In practical seminars, for example, she will enable students to develop projects on questions from education, occupational and labour market research and to answer them by analysing quantitative data, primarily from the BIBB Research Data Centre. At BIBB, she will share responsibility for methodological training and advising young researchers from the BIBB Graduate Support Programme.
The junior professorship in the cooperation model will also give students ideas for theses and, at the same time, insights into BIBB's diverse research projects and practical vocational training work. Professor Protsch has already taught on various topics of social structure analysis, sociology of the labour market and education, inequality research as well as research methods.
Paula Protsch previously worked as a research assistant and project manager at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and taught at the Free University of Berlin. Most recently, she took over the substitute professorship "Quantitative Methods of Empirical Social Research and Social Structure Analysis" at the European University of Flensburg. She has also been a visiting scholar at Yale University and the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER).
Dr Paula Protsch completed her doctorate in sociology at the Free University of Berlin on segmented training markets and the change in vocational opportunities; for this, she was awarded the Ernst Reuter Prize of the Free University of Berlin, the Sociology of Education Young Researcher Award of the DGS Section on Education and Training and the Friedrich Edding Prize for Vocational Education and Training.
Professor Protsch's research focuses on education, training and the labour market. It is based on analyses of quantitative individual and company data, as well as on a series of (quasi-)experiments in whose conception and collection she was significantly involved. Her research topics include social and regional inequalities in access to vocational training, social beliefs about the causes and equity of occupational success, and workplace recruitment strategies. She is also conducting research with BIBB colleagues in the research project "Heterogeneity of Training Occupations - Segments in Vocational Training" on the transition opportunities to training occupations with different cognitive requirement levels.