Dearth of qualified employees in Germany

This is the first blog post in which we are getting pushy, as in pushing it out via Twitter.

And since I found a can of vitriol that is a decade past its "use by" date, we open with the ongoing discussion in German media regarding the scarcity of engineers and folks for other technical jobs.

Depending on the publication and the weather, you will find some numbers, some insight and some hot air, hence the weather reference.

We have seen wonderful efforts of companies bringing young people in from Eastern Europe for schooling and training, and we have seen a program imitating the U.S. H1B qualified worker program.

We love popular physics, popular science in general, and readily admit a penchant for gross over simplification.

The debate about the scarcity of qualified employees around here looks to me like a Mandelbrot fractal image. The closer you look, the more you see, the more of the same you get, and you end up somewhere in infinity.

Right or wrong: The German labor market has not been known for its flexibility.

Neither.

Germany has shown a pretty impressive ability to absorb large numbers of foreigners in the boom times after World War II.
And that was also the time when, how can I say this, many lesser qualified natives had great careers because so many of their older countrymen or their own age had been shot to pieces.

What is different today? A shrinking and aging population? Schools getting worse? Unions still not condemned to irrelevance?

A little bit, probably of all of this.

And then there is the unsettling disregard for foreign qualifications. Engineers driving taxis because they do not have the right paper qualification. Companies holding out for the perfect employee even future genetic engineering will not bring them.

Ageism is quite bad here, it is not simply more out in the open than stateside, it really is worse.

And plain old politics.

The whole debates also pre-dates the time most of you were born. Look at 30 or 40 year old papers. Some of the areas of expertise mentioned there are the same.

Upcoming posts will return to the lighter tone of many previous ones, no worry.