Business Tools AG offers ETH employees continuing education courses focusing on entrepreneurship, management and transferable skills. The former spin-off from ETH Zurich is now celebrating its 25th anniversary.
It was Verena Steiner, later a non-fiction author and honorary councillor at ETH Zurich, who launched ETH tools in 1995, a continuing education platform for students whose course programmes, such as ‘Lernen mit Lust!’ (Learning with pleasure!), were very well received. In 2000, this developed into the independent Business Tools AG. Since then, the non-profit organisation, jointly sponsored by ETH, UZH and ZHAW, has been offering a practice-oriented continuing education programme tailored to university members. In compact one-day courses, participants can further develop their skills in entrepreneurial thinking and action. "Our offering is designed to complement ETH's own continuing education and training programmes, such as the Lifelong Learning Hub, and focuses on soft skills," says Managing Director Ruth Imholz.
Over the past 25 years, she has accompanied over 45,000 participants, around 40 per cent of whom were technical and administrative staff and members of scientific staff. Every year, around 1,500 participants attend the 40 or so interdisciplinary courses. "The fact that people from different fields with different backgrounds enrich each other in the courses is something very valuable," says Imholz. It is particularly important to her that the lecturers have a clear practical relevance. "Although our lecturers are often university lecturers, they are also self-employed or work in industry," says Imholz, who has made this a basic requirement. She looks back with pride on the varied last 25 years and is delighted with the high level of satisfaction among participants.
Business Tools AG will be launching new courses after the summer break. Thanks to the co-sponsorship of ETH Zurich, ETH members can participate at reduced rates.
Further Information
external page Current coursesNote on the translation
This text has been translated for your convenience using a machine translation tool. Although reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation, it may not be perfect. If in doubt, please refer to the German version.
Should you come upon significant translation mistakes, please send a short message to so that we can correct them. Thank you very much.
Always up to date
Would you like to always receive the most important internal information and news from ETH Zurich? Then subscribe to the "internal news" newsletter and visit Staffnet, the information portal for ETH employees.