"Fostering Health, Satisfaction, Productivity, and Students' Self in the Early Careers of Students"
Together with colleagues from Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands, we spent three wonderful days in Salzburg for our Thematic Small Group Meeting — and the atmosphere was simply great from start to finish.
We had so much time for genuine exchange: discussing each other's research in depth, sparking new ideas, and building the foundation for future collaborations. Our own contributions came from the GesA Stud project and the PLUSTRACK. GesA Stud is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt); PLUSTRACK is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung) and the University of Salzburg (Universität Salzburg).
This SGM was made possible through the generous funding of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology (EAWOP).
Across three days, we welcomed each other with a relaxed evening reception, went through three rounds of small-group presentations, explored Salzburg together, and closed with a day of synthesis, meta-theory co-creation, and a World Café translating our research into practice.
A true highlight was the keynote by Prof. Beatrice van der Heijden (Radboud University), one of the leading voices in sustainable careers and employability research worldwide — her talk gave us all so much to think about.
- A few key takeaways we're bringing home:
- This meeting brought together perspectives from career research, higher education, and social psychology for the first time
- Early support for students is crucial for fostering sustainable careers down the line
- There are already many promising approaches to support students — though systematic, large-scale implementation of both behavioral and structural interventions is still lacking
- Strong, theoretically grounded and empirically supported work deserves more visibility, and we need to keep pushing for long-term funding to offer these programs sustainably
Many thanks to my amazing GesA Stud team in Braunschweig - Anja Morstatt, Stephanie Hirschberger & Hannes Schilling - for leading content and programme planning, and to our outstanding Salzburg colleagues - Eva Jonas, Christina Mühlberger & Stefan Reiß - for their exceptional on-site coordination. We greatly appreciate this fantastic collaboration!
We're already looking forward to where these new collaborations will take us.