If there is not sufficient suitable personnel available on the labour market, it can help to increase one's efforts in qualifying one's existing employees. According to the IW Cologne Institute for Economic Research's latest continuing education survey, about two thirds of German enterprises agree with this statement.
Also, a good 83 per cent of polled companies provided continuing education for their employees in 2010. The employees made intensive use of this opportunity: On average, each employee attended about 29 hours of seminars and information events. In 2007, the year of the previous IW survey, it was only about 22 hours.
This shows that continuing education has significantly intensified over the course of the past three years. This is largely due to the employees themselves. They made increasing use of the time gained by short-time work and reduction of overtime resulting from the economic crisis, in order to obtain additional qualifications.
In 2010, each employee spent an average of ten hours of free time with continuing education. This is almost a third of the total time spent at workshops and events. Compared to 2007, the effort of learning in one's spare time has more than doubled. Yet the amount of hours spent with continuing education during working hours has increased as well by about 14 per cent.