Companies also like to take “half skilled workers”

by time news
major construction site

The construction industry is urgently looking for workers.

(Photo: dpa)

Berlin In Germany, the following applies to vocational training: all or nothing. A completed apprenticeship is seen as the royal road to the job market. A new study now shows that when looking for skilled workers, many companies are satisfied with some of the qualifications that normally belong to a job profile.

An evaluation of 860,000 online job advertisements in the construction and catering industries on behalf of the Bertelsmann Foundation showed: in more than two thirds of the job advertisements several partial qualifications are required – but not a full professional profile. Conversely, companies expect “unskilled workers” to have more skills than the term “unskilled” would suggest. The large mass of ads was automatically evaluated using an algorithm.

“The study shows that the traditional division into skilled workers and unskilled workers no longer applies on the labor market,” said Martin Noack, further education expert at the Bertelsmann Foundation, to the Handelsblatt.

The division of labor in the economy and the specialization of companies have meant that competence profiles between “fully trained” and “unskilled” are increasingly in demand. “We therefore need a flexible way for people to demonstrate the skills they have acquired on the job.”

Top-Jobs des Tages

Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.

The data shows that the openness of the economy to unskilled workers is obviously to be taken seriously: In a representative Bertelsmann survey in 2020, four out of five companies stated that they were willing to hire people who did not have a degree but had skills in be able to demonstrate one or more partial qualifications.

In view of the shortage of skilled workers and the additional restructuring of the labor market, the results of the survey could bring new impetus to the debate about the deficit in further vocational training in Germany – and revive the dispute about partial qualifications.

Restart necessary in further education

The potential of the unskilled alone is enormous: since 2014, the number of people between the ages of 20 and 34 without a professional qualification has risen from 280,000 to 2.16 million.

Experts such as those from the Handelsblatt Research Institute or the Institute of German Economics have long been calling for a fresh start in further education. The traffic light promised “new impetus” for further training, but so far nothing concrete is in sight. Denmark, on the other hand, has a nationwide modular training system.

Employers have repeatedly tried to split vocational training into modules over the past few decades. However, it mostly stayed with model projects, only in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg the movement is a bit further.

The Federal Employment Agency has now also defined partial qualifications and promotes acquisition by the unqualified. The trade unions in particular, on the other hand, rejected a broad departure from holistic training for fear of new low-wage groups.

Now, however, the evaluation by the Institute of Psychology at the Humboldt University in Berlin for the Bertelsmann Foundation shows that employers are obviously willing to hire specialists who are not fit in all sub-disciplines of their profession.

More Handelsblatt articles on the shortage of skilled workers in Germany

For example, in four out of five cases, companies looking for skilled workers in road and asphalt construction did not ask for full training, but were satisfied with an average of just under four out of six partial qualifications in these occupations. People who can repair roads were particularly in demand.

Similar results can also be seen for gastronomy. In three quarters of the cases, companies looking for kitchen specialists did not ask for a fully trained employee, but were satisfied with partial qualifications.

Service workers in particular were sought three to four times more frequently than those for the kitchen or housekeeping. On the other hand, only a quarter of the searching companies required the complete competence profile of a restaurant specialist. In the case of unskilled workers, on the other hand, substantial skills are often in demand: On average, a little more than three partial qualifications are also sought here.

The experts expect that the automated evaluation of job advertisements could also make life easier for job centers and other consultants in the future. Because for the first time it is possible to estimate the needs of the companies as precisely as possible, right down to the partial qualifications – both qualitatively and quantitatively.

More: The shortage of skilled workers could be far less – but in Germany a lot of talent is already being thwarted in kindergarten and schools

You may also like

Leave a Comment