From 16-19 June 2026, four staff members from Freie Universität Berlin travelled to Bologna to take part in a pilot workshop on professional skills development, designed to inform future training formats and support the next phase of collaboration – recently funded as Una.Via – within the Una Europa alliance.

The Una Europa Training Academy, a pilot programme developed by Università di Bologna (Unibo) alongside Freie Universität Berlin, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and Uniwersytet Jagielloński in Kraków, reflects the alliance’s commitment to professional growth for staff, researchers, and students. The Training Academy will be a central work package led by Unibo and FU Berlin under Una.Via. The pilot was titled “Alliance-Ready: Key Competences for Professional Staff to Navigate International Projects in HEIs.”

The Bologna pilot engaged 18 participants from nine partner universities through a blend of three online modules and a final in-person workshop. The programme targeted professional services staff—those responsible for turning high-level institutional strategies into tangible collaboration. To ensure the programme's alignment with actual needs, the curriculum was informed by the strategic insights of the alliance’s Heads of HR, who identified the core competences essential for future international partnerships.

As one of the trainers leading the practical sessions, Nicholas Hübner, Head of Professional Skills Development at Freie Universität Berlin, was deeply impressed by the University of Bologna’s excellent organisation and by participants’ engagement with interactive sociocratic decision‑making tools tailored to complex higher‑education contexts. In the stakeholder‑management module, the emphasis was on actionable methodologies, notably Civic Environment Mapping, used to reveal hidden power dynamics and identify key actors across international project ecosystems. A core highlight was guiding the group through the consent procedure, helping participants resolve procedural blockages according to the principle “good enough for now, safe enough to try.” The session showed how structured moderation frameworks can transform potential friction into constructive collaboration across diverse institutional cultures and case scenarios.

Kirsten Schmiester, Senior Project Lead at Freie Universität Berlin, was very impressed with the design of the programme. The online modules set the scene perfectly, giving participants a taste of what was to come during the in-person training, and allowed for the group to get to know each other. Especially the interactive module on stakeholder engagement and the workshop on the merits as well as the pitfalls of intercultural team dynamics, where the working language of English is not everyone’s native language, proved to be extremely relevant. Kirsten Schmiester is excited to co-lead the Training Academy work package with Unibo under the Una.Via project and is looking forward to further developing the training pilot in the next two years.

Here is what Ulrike Geiger (Deputy Managing Director of the Department of Biology, Chemistry, Pharmacy) said about her participation in the workshop:

“I felt already being an old hand in intercultural networking, and at the same time [I] was learning which seemed [like] very basic facts. That’s something really fascinating to me, that one might be active in the field for many years already, but still has so much to see the moment one gets out of the own comfort zone. I feel like we need to let in more impulses from the outside, like for example from our partner institutions when we think of shared resources for example.”

Klaus Wiehl, Una Europa Project Manager and Senior Local Lead at Freie Universität Berlin, highlighted the programme's practical value, particularly its focus on AI and stakeholder engagement. He praised the intensive, hands-on format for fostering both professional growth and strong interpersonal networks. According to Klaus Wiehl, the Academy proves that combining high-quality training with authentic human connection is key to building a resilient, collaborative European university community.