More apartments, more wind turbines, finally rehabilitating the dilapidated bridges: Germany has big plans.

However, the skilled workers urgently required for this are already scarce - and since the beginning of the corona pandemic, dual vocational training has also been in crisis.

After the number of newly concluded training contracts plummeted in 2020 and reached its lowest level since reunification, the situation hardly improved last year.

Britta Beeger

Editor in Business.

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As the Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday, around 467,000 new training contracts were concluded in 2021.

That was only 0.3 percent more than a year earlier and almost 10 percent less than in 2019, before the crisis began.

With the exception of agriculture and the liberal professions, there were declines in all areas - including, for example, 3.6 percent in industry and trade.

The main reason is a lack of applicants, as shown not only by official data from the Federal Employment Agency, but also by a company survey by their research facility, the Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research, which was also published on Wednesday.

In the survey, in which between 1,500 and 2,000 companies take part each month, almost half of the companies said that the number of applications for an apprenticeship position has fallen during the pandemic.

41 percent are also of the opinion that the quality of the applications has decreased.

Even before Corona, many companies had difficulties filling their training positions.

This applies in particular to construction.

However, the problems have worsened during the crisis.

Less career advice, fewer internships

The researchers explain the development on the one hand by the fact that due to the pandemic there was less careers advice in schools, training fairs were canceled and companies offered fewer internships due to home office and short-time work.

According to the survey, around four out of ten companies have reduced or stopped offering internships during the pandemic.

On the other hand, due to the high level of uncertainty about further economic development, many young people have decided to remain in the school system for the time being or to start studying - this seems to them to be safer than training in the hospitality industry, for example.

In order to fill their training places, companies try to become more attractive to potential applicants and to reach more young people: In the survey, a good half of the companies stated that they were willing to make compromises in the quality of the applications, for example with regard to the school qualification.

Even if they find trainees, there is another problem: After all, it is not enough to fill the apprenticeship positions – the young people also have to successfully complete their training.

"Both suffered significantly during the pandemic," says IAB Director Bernd Fitzenberger.

The proportion of companies with successful training qualifications fell significantly in 2021: to just 38 percent.

The companies attribute this, among other things, to smaller cohorts and postponed exams.

The bad news for companies is that current figures from the Federal Employment Agency indicate that the situation will not improve this year either.

From October 2021 to March 2022, significantly more training places were reported to the employment agencies, but the number of applicants continued to fall.

There is still a lot that can be done before the start of the new training year in autumn, but there is a risk of repeating what was observed during and after the economic crisis of 2009: the number of training contracts fell sharply back then too.

The decline was never recovered.