What’s more exciting than meeting friends and colleagues from around the world?

When you work in the world of international education, it’s essential to stay in touch with colleagues from around the world in order keep up to date with the latest trends and developments.

This month, More Than English founders, David Meddows and Claire Norwood were in Berlin taking part in the world’s biggest education conference: ICEF Berlin (October 30 – November 01 2022).

As well as learning about developments in education and market trends, this annual event is an opportunity for universities, colleges and summer school providers such as More Than English to meet the education agencies who promote and sell international education, and find the best way of working together.

35 meetings. 21 nationalities.

Over just two days, Claire and David had 35 meetings with the representatives and directors of education agencies from Ukraine, Spain, Georgia, Romania, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Italy, Cyprus, UK, France, Portugal, Egypt, Malta, Poland, Czech Republic,  Slovenia, Lebanon, Qatar and India,

In total, the event involved 2,460 friends and colleagues from 114 countries.

Takeaways

Here are some of the most important things we learnt:

• Education agencies are more and more preferring to work with  smaller education providers that can provide consistently high standard and personalised education services even in the most challenging international conditions.

Attention is power

• Generation Z have arrived in education institutions and they have different needs to Millennials.  Before the tech era arrived we used to say “knowledge is power”. With the arrival of the AI, data harvesting and the smartphone,  the mantra changed to “information is power.” These days, with so much knowledge and data available with the swipe of a finger, overload and distraction have brought us to a new world where “attention is power.”   Helping students develop this key skill is important for education institutions.
• Our final takeaway is that the best pretzels are in Germany.

Students!! If you get an invitation from German More Than English students to visit Berlin, Hamburg, Munich or anywhere else in Germany, say "yes!"