Skilled worker shortage in Germany – this issue has had an impact on almost all areas of vocational education and training for years. Yet sometimes, the vocational schools, where skilled workers are trained for so many fields, are pushed into the background. How can these trainees be encouraged to go into management or set up their own company, even if they don't have a degree?
Important innovation mostly comes not from multi-nationals, but from small and medium-sized enterprises. So where is the next generation of innovative entrepreneurs going to come from? To answer this question, the German Association of State Certified Engineers is planning to provided better targeted information to trainees, to improve networking between vocational schools, higher education and business, set up information centres and offer practical help.
This initiative has clear aims: strengthen the position of the technical colleges in comparison with higher education, create inter-connections between these two training tracks and demonstrate that it is not always necessary to have degree to enter management in industry or trade.
Because the message coming through is that German companies have an urgent need not only for well-qualified graduates, but also for graduates from vocational schools with the confidence to take on management positions, as Dirk Baumbach from the Association of Vocational School Teachers in Sachsen explained.
"After all, in the technical colleges, training is carried out at higher education level. And we need to make sure that certain things which have been introduced in higher education are introduced in technical colleges too. And we should look at what changes we can make on one side or the other to ensure that training doesn’t take longer than necessary and that it doesn't take ten or fifteen years to prepare people for these kinds of positions or to set up their own companies."
Baumbach would like to see more balanced learning content in the future, with vocational school students' practical experience being backed up by theory-based knowledge from higher education. This requires better exchange of knowhow, which could well be achieved through these kinds of initiatives.
The problem faced on both sides is the same: Too many young people in higher education, too few workers in trade, particularly in technical ones. We have to put this issue on the table, agreed Bernd Schinke, representing higher education.
"In German society right now, an awful lot of people are trying to get an academic qualification, without really thinking about whether that's the right choice for them personally. There's a demand for good people in vocational education and training as well as academic education. And if the institutes of higher education siphon off the best from vocational education – be it intentionally or not – then there'll be a shortage of high quality trainees."