Work4Germany 2025: On the road to success for a different way of working in the federal administration despite tight budgets

Berlin, 01.04.2025
The Work4Germany Fellowship enters its next and now sixth round in April. The fact that the fellowship will continue to the same extent as in 2024 despite the challenges posed by the provisional budget for the federal administration is an impressive illustration of its convincing and sustainable effectiveness for the participating organizations. Starting today, 15 projects from the federal administration will be supported for six months by experts in new work from the private and non-profit sectors. The aim of the collaboration is to empower administrative staff and teams to shape a new digital culture for a different way of working - and to increase performance.

In order to be able to act quickly and innovatively, a strong democracy needs an efficient administration – and an efficient administration needs new and modern ways of working: a digital culture. Since 2020, Work4Germany has been bringing together experts in transformation and new work from the private sector as “fellows” with employees of the federal administration. In this way, Work4Germany promotes collaboration and skills-based working, skills development in the area of agile working, cross-departmental cooperation and the elimination of silo thinking. The fellowship programme is organized by DigitalService as the federal administration's in-house digitalization partner.

In 2025, the fellowship team was able to select 15 projects from a total of nine federal ministries and supreme federal authorities for participation. Interest from the private sector was also enormous once again, with over 170 applications for 15 positions.

This time, the focus of the selected projects can be divided into three areas – including the projects:

Collaboration

• Interdepartmental cooperation – BMFSFJ (German only)
• Process optimization in the field of artificial intelligence – BMWK (German only)

Digitalization

• Data laboratory for development work – BMZ (German only)
• Guidelines for IT projects – German Bundestag (Administration) (German only)
• Working with artificial intelligence – BMDV (German only)

(Comprehensive) transformation

• Further development of forms of cooperation – UBA (German only)
• Supporting the introduction of the federal e-file – BMFSFJ (German only)
• Digital and data-supported solutions for the BMBF (German only)

Magdalena Zadara, Chief of Staff & Strategy DigitalService: “We are particularly pleased that the participating ministries and authorities have prioritized participation in the fellowship in view of the special budget situation. Over the past five years, Work4Germany has convincingly demonstrated that the investment is worthwhile and that the participating institutions benefit in the long term.”

Hannah Bergmann, Project Manager Work4Germany: “Collaboration and process optimization are a perennial issue for digital administration. We can also see this in the constant interest in Work4Germany. We are delighted to be able to use the fellowship once again this year as part of highly relevant projects and to show that other forms of work are possible in the federal administration.”