#schongenial: Dear Mario, thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. Let's start with a basic question: for anyone who doesn't know you yet, take us on a journey through your career to date.
Mario Derntl: I started my career with an apprenticeship as a mechatronics technician and later completed the vocational maturity examination and a degree in business administration in Vienna. During my MBA studies in California, I was able to gain valuable experience at Mercedes-Benz USA in Atlanta and San Francisco. After a brief stopover at Siemens, former Energie-AG CEO DDr Werner Steinecker, who himself completed an apprenticeship before his Energie-AG career, brought me to the initiative zukunft.lehre.österreich. We have built this up from 25 to 250 member companies. Since 2023, I have been CEO of Talents&Company, a start-up that uses data-based solutions to modernise apprenticeship training and help companies and young people to realise their full potential. I founded the company together with two school friends and ex-Runtastic CEO Florian Gschwandtner as an investor.
#schongenial: Thank you very much. Can you take us a little deeper into your company? Who is Talents&Company and what exactly do you do?
Mario Derntl: Talents&Company is a young start-up with a clear mission: we want to fundamentally improve the training of apprentices in companies. Our focus is on helping companies not only to make their training more modern and efficient, but also to optimise the individual potential of young people. We use data-based approaches to analyse the status quo in apprenticeship training and identify specific potential for optimisation.
#schongenial: That sounds very exciting. What exactly does your approach look like?
Mario Derntl: In our consultancy, we use state-of-the-art tools and our AI, which has been specially adapted for training, to analyse the current situation in a company and work with our customers to develop tailored strategies for improvement. We don't just focus on figures and data, but also on the people behind them. This means, for example, that we analyse recruiting flows for the company, calculate their apprentice potential and prepare benchmarkings for them, but also conduct many personal discussions with the people in the company.
#schongenial: Do you work exclusively in consulting?
Mario Derntl: Consultancy and strategic support in training was exciting for us right from the start, as we can help quickly and in a targeted manner and have now supported over 50 companies such as Palfinger, Salzburg AG, VERBUND and REWE. However, the big vision was always to develop a digital product for companies that helps them with their three major challenges - finding talent, training talent in an appreciative manner and retaining talent in the long term. To this end, we launched our beta version a few weeks ago.
#schongenial: What exactly are you developing here?
Mario Derntl: The aim behind Talents&Leaders - our digital training platform - is to provide access to knowledge and data relating to apprenticeship training from anywhere and at any time. Our beta customers, such as A1 and SPAR, can currently access more than 100 successfully implemented best practice examples from all German-speaking countries and share their training challenges in a specially created community. In the next step, they can use their predefined criteria to customise these successfully implemented examples for their own company. In this way, we can help companies with their major training challenges and build a European best-practice community of over 500,000 companies.
#schongenial: Dear Mario, thank you very much for the interview.