(Inteviewed in 2019)

Dagmar Möbius

After graduating from high school and training as a bank teller, Annikka Zurwehme decided to study business education at TU Dresden. For the native of Hesse, heading to eastern Germany was exciting; many of her peers at the time found it incomprehensible. She was to remain in Saxony for 15 years. This was where she graduated as a business teacher, earned her doctorate, and worked as a research associate. She has been back living and working in her home region for ten years now. In Hesse, she teaches at a university and runs Büro für Bildungsfragen Deutschland. And as a mother of three daughters, she is a master of time management.

Annikka Zurwehme knew that she "wanted to be more than just a registration number." In 1994, she opted for a degree at TU Dresden, despite the fact that she could have studied in Göttingen or Stuttgart-Hohenheim. Born in Frankenberg an der Eder, Hesse, in 1972, she trained as a bank teller at Commerzbank after graduating from high school. Originally, she had wanted to study business management. "But I realized that I would rather do vocational training. And then I discovered business education, an interdisciplinary degree program that would allow me to combine the two."

The choice of where to study was a gut decision. "I looked at all three places and decided on Dresden on impulse," says Annikka Zurwehme, looking back. She had never been to Saxony before. Yet despite the distance from her family, she "found it exciting to study at a university in former East Germany. The TU Dresden Faculty of Business and Economics, which had only been set up in 1993, appealed to me because I wanted to help shape something." Annikka Zurwehme also found the people warm and friendly. "Everywhere I went, I was greeted with a smile." She liked the campus with its old buildings and unique atmosphere. Back then, she had no idea that this is also where she would also meet her husband, who is originally from Bautzen.

The majority of students enrolled in the new business education program in the early 1990s were women. From her second semester at TUD, Annikka Zurwehme worked as a student assistant, was involved in the student council and took on its public relations work, and later co-founded Absolventenring nexus e.V. "A lot of trust was placed in us, and what we said was valued," she says appreciatively. "I still benefit today from what I learned at TU Dresden, from my experiences there, and from the dedicated professors in our faculty. They saw the students as individuals and our personal development was important to them." As an example, she cites Professor Thomas W. Günther. In a lecture on the fundamentals of management accounting, he invited her to join a team working on educational software, a role that ultimately led to a position as a research assistant at the Chair of Management Accounting. Professor Ralf Witt not only gave her "access to various leading figures in business education," he also afforded her the opportunity to explore her dissertation topic in more depth in an externally funded cooperative project involving both chairs. Professor Horst Walter Endriss and his tax lectures were also unforgettable. "For his dedication, we on the student council honored him with a teaching award. He thanked us with a party – more than 1,000 students celebrated in front of the Hülße-Bau building," she recalls, having helped organize the event. One negative experience has also stuck in her mind: "Two beer taps were stolen during the night after the party. Since then, I've known that there's a market for taps." Still, that was far from the last Endriss party.

Annika Zurwehme also helped organize the faculty's first graduation ball. It was held in 1996 in Dreikönigskirche church. "We had absolutely no idea beforehand how many people would actually come, and had not been generous enough with the buffet," she recalls. They had to order pizza to make sure everyone had enough to eat. "But that only happened to us once – and the pizza delivery place probably did the business of its life that night," she laughs.

After graduating in 2000 with excellent grades in business education, Annikka Zurwehme worked as a research associate at the TUD Chair of Management Accounting/Control and completed a doctorate degree. Her thesis on the success-based management of continuing education institutions: thoughts on the development of a management accounting system for education providers ("Erfolgsbezogene Steuerung von Weiterbildungseinrichtungen – Überlegungen zur Entwicklung eines Controlling-Systems für Bildungsanbieter") was awarded "magna cum laude" in 2006.

In 2009, shortly after the birth of her first daughter, Annikka Zurwehme moved back to Hesse and founded bfb Büro für Bildungsfragen Deutschland, a partner company of BfB Büro für Bildungsfragen AG in Thalwil, Switzerland. She primarily advises schools and continuing education institutions on management issues. The priority is not always efficiency; the key focus is on quality improvement. She sees "transferring systematic structures to social processes, which are generally difficult to plan," as the central challenge of her work. "Two passions drive my work. One is management control and the other is education," says the expert. For example, "you can come up with great plans for classes, and then things end up working out differently in a given situation. Unlike in industry, you have to reposition yourself every day. Management structures in educational institutions must therefore always allow for different options and the necessary scope and freedom to manage them."

Annikka Zurwehme has also taught at the University of Duisburg-Essen, at the FOM University of Applied Sciences in Leipzig and, from 2009 to 2017, in the Department of Food Technology at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, where she focused on strategic management, cost accounting and management, business, and operational decision-making tools.

Since the summer of 2017, Annikka Zurwehme has been Professor of Quality Management and Management Accounting at FOM University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt am Main. She teaches in areas including aspects of accounting. Annikka Zurwehme has taken the lead over the past two semesters in designing an "Education & Digital Learning" master's degree program that is suitable for people switching to teaching from other professions and is "a practical alternative for students who are looking to get into education and see work with digital media as a great opportunity."

"My path to this professorship was not a direct one," says the 46-year-old, now the mother of three daughters – the youngest girls are seven-year-old twins. For a long time, she had a part-time teaching post (1/3 FTE). Today, she teaches a lot on weekends. "I always try find a good balance between family and work that means I can do justice to both; a balance that feels good and right to me. That requires a lot of flexibility and may not be the ideal model, but things don't work with a standard framework," is her assessment. "On the flip side, your time management improves and you use available resources more efficiently," laughs the woman who often writes at night and in the early hours of the morning.

In addition to her work as a university lecturer, Prof. Annikka Zurwehme facilitates teaching staff training days, workshops, and training courses for ministries, schools, and other educational organizations. "Here too, you never know how things are going to go," she smiles, "but as a mother of twins, you learn to deal with the unexpected and always have a plan B."

In terms of research, she works primarily on issues around the effectiveness of management tools for educational processes. For example, she has previously studied how quality management affects individual student learning. She is soon to conduct a study on the effectiveness of a professorship at the interface of multiple departments at an art college. Qualitative evaluation methods will be employed to establish, among other things, the unplanned impact on students, the college, and the region or society.

"It is exciting to have different things on the go at once," says Prof. Annikka Zurwehme. Adding that "in the long run, it has all been worth it."

Update 2022:
"I have been teaching general business administration and quality management in the Department of Food Technology at Fulda University of Applied Sciences since the 2019/20 winter semester. It’s exciting because I can really get engineering students passionate about business management and it gives me the chance to draw on the skills I acquired back when I studied business education…"

Contact:
Prof. Annikka Zurwehme
Tel.: +49 6198 599610
Email
Web

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