The shortage of skilled workers is getting worse.

This actually suggests that companies are training more young people – but there are also fewer and fewer applicants for training positions.

As a survey by the Association of Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) shows, last year alone 42 percent of the 180,000 training companies in this area were unable to fill all of the apprenticeship positions.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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"And more than one in three of these companies has not received a single application," said Deputy DIHK General Manager Achim Dercks on Thursday.

He speaks of an “alarming all-time high”.

For comparison: in 2018, 32 percent of the companies reported that they could not have filled all the positions.

Expected only slight improvement

Dercks cites demographic development as one of the causes: every year, more older employees are now retiring than young people are leaving school.

At the same time, the contact restrictions imposed by the corona pandemic continued to have an impact on the training system - which not only made direct contact between companies and school leavers more difficult: the careers advisers from the employment agencies no longer came to the schools and training fairs and company internships were canceled.

"This has increased the disorientation of many young people," regrets Dercks.

The DIHK does not yet have a precise overview for the 2022/23 training year that is just beginning.

Compared to 2021, he expects a slightly increasing number of new training contracts, Dercks indicated.

A compensation for the upheavals caused by the pandemic is not yet in sight.

Last year, 259,000 out of a total of 473,000 new training contracts were with IHK companies.

In 2019, they had gained 305,000 new trainees, with 525,000 new contracts across all areas of dual training.

Even industry is affected

For the skilled trades, its central association ZDH had recently reported an intermediate status for the beginning of the 2022/23 training year: by the end of June, 61,256 new training contracts were registered with the chambers, slightly fewer than in the middle of last year.

The liberal professions (including lawyers, architects, doctors), on the other hand, recorded an increase of 6.8 percent to 25,500 new trainees in the middle of the year, which also exceeded the level of 2019.

As the DIHK survey of around 15,000 companies shows, the problem of the lack of applicants now extends far beyond sectors such as the hospitality industry, which were already struggling for young professionals before Corona and were then hit hard by the lockdowns: Even in industry, the was always considered a safe bet and lures with above-average training allowances, half of the training companies were affected last year - 17 percentage points more than in 2018. In the hospitality industry, even two-thirds report that they were not able to fill all the places.

There is another factor that could at least partially explain the shortage: the state-organized professions related to care and education are not recorded with the usual statistics for dual training.

There is some evidence that political efforts to address staff shortages in these areas are attracting more young people there.