Workation with your parents? Lisa tried out exactly that. For a week, she combined work and family time in a vacation home in Italy. Read on to find out how it worked and what she took away from it.
Why learn alone when learning together makes you smarter? The Burda Academy is a platform for all Burda employees who want to support and help each other advance.
Burda supports all employees in their professional and personal development, as well as in deepening their knowledge of methods and tools. In the future, Burda Academy will be the platform within Burda Learning that brings everyone together for their professional development and supports Burda as a learning organization.
Just under a year ago, BurdaForward Academy moved to Julia Menninga's Organization and Personnel Development Team (OEPE) together with Marie-Anne Hollenz. From that point on, selected courses were opened up to all Burda employees – with great success: between October 2024 and July 2025, over 600 colleagues from across the Burda cosmos took part in 26 learning sessions. This strong feedback has shown that sharing experiences and learning together are more important than ever! The Burda Academy will therefore offer specialist topics for everyone within Burda Learning in the future.
The goal is clear: to create a learning organization in which colleagues share their knowledge with each other. This creates a strong community that supports and develops each other and becomes more successful together—especially when it comes to topics such as AI.
To better achieve this goal, the Academy team has been reorganized. Marie-Anne Hollenz and Sophia Neubauer will form the team going forward.
“With this expansion, we are meeting the needs of all employees to become even better and faster at what they do,” says Julia Menninga, Head of OEPE.
Based on the response so far, the range of courses on offer will be further expanded. The new program will start in September with courses in various formats in six subject areas (see program overview). “With a constantly growing and updated range of courses, we are always close to the business,” says Marie-Anne Hollenz, who is in constant contact with the target group, trainers, and experts.
To ensure that the training courses are as practical as possible, the Academy team regularly consults with managers and colleagues. This has resulted in successful sessions such as “AI at BurdaForward: The use of tools – overview, use cases & live demos” and fact-checking sessions for quickly verifying false reports. The large OEPE training survey also provides valuable input for future Academy offerings.
Yannic Lipp, Head of Brand Management Chip and Efahrer.com, gave one of the most successful presentations of the year so far on the topic of “TikTok: How do we make money with it?” He explains: “It was important to us that every listener hopefully leaves the course with new insights and at least one added value for themselves and their own area of responsibility.”
If a topic cannot be covered internally by a Burda expert, the Academy team starts looking for an external trainer. In the case of fact-checking courses, for example, it has entered into a partnership with the German Press Agency (dpa). However, external trainers are only commissioned in rare cases. This is because our Burda experts know the needs of their colleagues and the individual units best.
“I adapt the exercises to current use cases and respond to the individual prior knowledge of my participants to ensure the greatest possible practical benefit,” says in-house trainer Sarah Kilian, Business Development & AI Manager, Content Network. As a trainer, she provides assistance with prompt engineering and successful interaction with language models.
All Burda colleagues can become trainers and share their expert knowledge. The Academy provides the platform and framework for this.
👉 All information about the Burda Academy, you can find here.
👉 If you want to learn more about all benefits at Burda, click here.
