Bernhard Rohleder (born 1965) helped launch Bitkom e.V. at the end of 1999 and has been the association's Chief Executive Officer ever since.
Rohleder began his professional career with positions at ZF Friedrichshafen GmbH in Saarbrücken, the Ploetz press publishing house (Presseverlag Ploetz) in Berlin and the Brandenburg Ministry of Economics in Potsdam. In 1994, he joined the Information Technology Association of the VDMA and ZVEI, Frankfurt/Main, as their press spokesman and executive assistant. Three years later, Rohleder took over the position of deputy managing director and shortly thereafter he became managing director. In 1997, he was simultaneously appointed Secretary General of Eurobit, the leading European IT industry association, based in Brussels and Frankfurt. In 2000, he merged Eurobit with the European Association of the Communications Technology Industry to form the new umbrella organization Digital Europe, and subsequently represented the German high-tech industry on its board. In 1997/1998, Rohleder also held the rotating position of Secretary General of the International Information Industry Congress (IIIC), the world association of the IT industry. From 1997 to 2005, he was also Managing Director of the market research institute European Information Technology Observatory (EITO).
Rohleder is a member of the Agora Verkehrswende Council and the advisory board of the Mobility Data Space, the expert advisory board ‘Climate Protection in Mobility’ at the Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport and the ‘Digitalisation of the Working World’ platform of the German government's Digital Summit.
Rohleder studied, among other things, political science from 1987, first at Saarland University and later at the Paris Institut d'Etudes Politiques, where he graduated in 1991. He received his doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) from Freie Universität Berlin. Rohleder is married, has one child and lives in Brandenburg.
