German career civil service employees are often trained by the government itself. It makes perfect sense for many jobs that do not have a private sector equivalent, like law enforcement, for example.
In other areas, you can debate how much sense it makes, and one of them has made headlines recently, eliciting a satisfied grunt from the K-Landnews TheEditor. It** rumbled: See, told you slashing government by 50% wouldn't hurt anybody.
The agency in the news was the federal Jobcenter/Employment Agency, or Arbeitsagentur in German. Like other countries. Germany has been on a re-branding binge for a couple of decades when successive governments discovered that re-branding is a lot cheaper than improving operations or adhering to the constitution.*
Almost a decade ago, the Arbeitsagentur established its own college to train young employees in the fine art of providing services to the unemployed and to employers. Much of the training for job seekers focuses on basics, such as resume writing and interview skills, how to become a cook, a security guard, or get a GED. And this program saw large cuts in the last few years.
The agency has been less stingy where training its own people is concerned, prompting a recent budget oversight agency report to point out that the college costs twice as much per student as the national college average.
The college website describes the abundant facilities and points out that they have apartments for 300 students. 33 tenured professors plus ten teachers take care of a grand total of around 850 students. The site quotes a student-teacher ratio of 1:25, stating this is probably rarely found at other schools.
So, good education and training can be had at the Arbeitsagentur, just not if you are unemployed.
** TheEditor insists on gender neutrality.
* Germany's highest court ruled basic benefit sanctions for the unemployed unconstitutional, but nothing really changed.
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