The best way to understand project management is to do it. That is the idea behind how the Vocational School Gutjahr in Halle (Saale) trains the next generation of IT specialists. As a school and IT competence center educating around 300 students in a three-year dual program, Gutjahr uses OpenProject to bring project methodologies to life. First, OpenProject serves as a live demonstration in the classroom. Later, students use it to scope, plan, and deliver their own final projects. In this case study, we explore how the Gutjahr Vocational School and OpenProject benefit from each other and why OpenProject can be the ideal solution for educational institutions.
Training the IT specialists of tomorrow: About the Vocational School Gutjahr
The Gutjahr Vocational School (Berufsbildende Schule “Gutjahr”) is located in Halle (Saale) in the center of Germany. As a school and IT competence center, it educates IT specialists as part of a three-year dual vocational training program. Key components of the training include system integration, data and process analysis, digital networking, and application development. However, the school also offers training in other fields, such as laboratory and process technology, automotive mechatronics, and various craft professions.
Learning by doing: How Gutjahr Vocational School is using OpenProject
Application development is a key focus of the education program at the Gutjahr Vocational School. Students therefore become familiar with IT project management and agile methods early on, as working on IT projects in a company requires more than programming skills and domain-specific knowledge. It also requires the ability to work within a company’s development cycles. Agile methods are particularly important in the IT industry, and learning them means more than memorizing terms and phases. This is where OpenProject comes in: used as teaching material, it provides a live demonstration of how project management works in practice.
OpenProject: Which features do teachers find particularly important for teaching?
“In vocational education, it is crucial to create a strong link to professional practice. The use of OpenProject allows our students to work in a realistic project environment, using milestones and timelines. Another key benefit in educational settings is the high degree of transparency. Teachers can track project progress, see how tasks and responsibilities are distributed, provide guidance or intervene when necessary, and use the documented contributions as a basis for evaluation. Finally, our classroom experience shows that the integrated wiki is particularly useful for providing students with central guidelines, project requirements, and supporting materials throughout the project.” – Gregor Zollenkopf, Gutjahr Vocational School
Screenshot: Example of the OpenProject’s Wiki module using sample data, not customer data.
Conseil
If you want to try out the Wiki module yourself, you can easily start a free trial. As document workflows are one of the key focuses of our OpenProject Roadmap 2026, the module evolves continuously, including live collaboration and intuitive comment functions.
But OpenProject isn’t just useful for teachers; it’s also meant to be used by the students themselves. At the end of the dual vocational training program, the students have to create a final project. In the process, students have to learn to define the scope, plan their resources, prioritize tasks, and break their ideas down into milestones and deliverables. By using OpenProject, students work under realistic conditions with software they may well use in their future jobs – software that already offers all the features they need to learn.
OpenProject: Which features do students value most when they use OpenProject to carry out their own projects?
“Our experience shows that structuring a project into work packages and assigning clearly defined project roles is particularly valuable for students. It requires them to break down the overall project into manageable components and think systematically about the different project phases. This helps them understand the logic and structure of project management and develop a more systematic approach to working on IT projects. At the same time, OpenProject provides a common workspace for efficient and transparent collaboration across school and workplace contexts, consolidating project planning, coordination, and documentation within a single platform.” – Gregor Zollenkopf, Gutjahr Vocational School
Screenshot: Example of the OpenProject’s Boards module using sample data, not customer data.
Shaping the future of IT project management together: The benefits of OpenProject for Gutjahr Vocational School
To get started and familiarize themselves with the software, the Gutjahr Vocational School first used the convenient SaaS solution. Once OpenProject had proven effective in practice, they switched to self-hosting it on their own servers. This seamless transition from a trial to a self-hosted, managed version without losing any data is an ideal solution for educational institutions, as they noted.
Gutjahr Vocational School also praised the flexibility of OpenProject’s open source approach. Open source code and transparent development ensure long-term sustainability and protection against vendor lock-in, which is especially important for educational institutions.
But the educational use of the software brings advantages for OpenProject as well. Working with schools means learning from early adopters and receiving hands-on feedback on usability and documentation, since young learners quickly reveal where an instruction is unclear or a workflow could be more intuitive. This helps us keep improving a product that is both functional and backed by comprehensive documentation that students can rely on throughout their training. Generally, the community of OopenProject, consisting of users, customers, supporters and many more, is an integral part of our development process. You can find out exactly how this works, and how you too can help improve OpenProject, in our blog article “How the open source Community drives OpenProject”.
Beyond the immediate feedback, supporting education aligns closely with our mission. By familiarizing the next generation of IT professionals with OpenProject early on, we build long-term awareness among the decision-makers of tomorrow and help establish an open standard for project management. In our blog article “The future of project management is open source” by our CEO Niels Lindenthal, we outline some of the many reasons why a large share of project management software in use will be open source in the future. Just as importantly, working with institutions like the Gutjahr Vocational School fosters an understanding of digital sovereignty and self-hosting from the very start of a career, which reflects the open source values at the core of everything we do.
Considering OpenProject for your educational institution – whether for teaching or hands-on use? Feel free to contact us to explore your options.
