Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB)

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Chart 1

Number of training places being reported on the decline particularly in western Germany

In contrast to earlier years, the number of training places being reported to Germany's employment offices fell during the last placement year, particularly in the western parts of the country (please see Chart 1).

Moreover, above-average declines were registered in precisely those states which previously had the best supply balance: Bavaria reported a 9.9-percent decline in the number of training places on offer and Baden-Württemberg posted a 10.3% drop. Nonetheless, the training place situation in both these states is still much better than it is in most other sections of Germany. Some parts of the country actually reported an increase in the number of training places on offer in 2003. It must however be remembered that companies in Germany are not required to notify their local employment office of training places they are offering. Shifts in the number of apprenticeships and traineeships being reported are therefore only of limited use for drawing conclusions regarding actual trends on the training place market.

The actual number of training places being offered this year is not yet known at this time. This information will be available only after the Federal Institute for Vocational Training's survey of new training contracts signed during the year is completed in December 2003.

Chart 2

The number of persons who have not yet been placed does not include all persons who are still seeking a training place

The number of young people who are registered with one of Germany's employment offices as seeking a training place rose by 8,200 to a total of 719,600 this year. These young people vied for one of the 546,700 apprenticeships and traineeships that companies had reported to the employment offices. Some 338,500 of the 719,600 registered training place-seekers could be placed. Another 310,300 opted for an alternative such as school, vocational preparation schemes, university, employment, or a year of voluntary work and community service. The destinations of approximately 35,700 remain unknown. Some 210,000 to 250,000 young people 0 exact figures will be available in December 0 found a training place without registering with an employment office.

Considerable dispute exists over why so many training place-seekers who are registered with an employment office ultimately do something else. Was this a voluntary decision or the result of a lack of training places? The employment offices' statistics do not provide any information on this. It is however striking that the share of training place-seekers who opt for an alternative has grown substantially since 1992. This is particularly the case in western Germany (please see Chart 2). In 1992, 66 percent of all applicants with a known destination ended up with a training place. By 2003, this figure was only 45 percent. By contrast, the share of persons with an alternative destination rose from 31 percent to more than 50 percent.

Chart 3

Parallel to this, there was a rise in the number of applicants who opted for an alternative but also remained registered with the employment offices as officially seeking a training place even though they had already started another option. The number of young people in this category reached 46,700 this year, with 40,800 coming from Germany's western states and 5,900 from the eastern states (please see Chart 3). Counting this group together with the 35,000 yet unplaced applicants, there were some 81,700 young people as of 30 September 2003 who were still looking for a training place according to official figures from the Federal Employment Services.

The actual number of applicants who have embarked on an alternative to an apprenticeship or traineeship 0 not necessarily voluntarily and primarily due to a lack of success with their applications 0 could possibly be much larger, as the findings of representative surveys of training place applicants which BIBB and the Federal Employment Services conducted in 2001 and 2002 indicate. According to these surveys, nearly half of the applicants who were not receiving training in the dual vocational training system cited "unsuccessful applications for training places" as the reason for their alternative destination. At the time these surveys were conducted, approximately one in every five would have preferred taking up a training place 0 even two months after training had officially started. Applying this to 2003, this would mean that in the autumn of 2003, there were 65,000 to 70,000 young people who were interested in finding a training place (346,000 x .20 = 69,200) in addition to the 35,000 young people who had not yet been placed.

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Chart 4

Applicants' willingness to move is greater than previously assumed
The Federal Employment Services / BIBB survey conducted in 2002 also made it clear that young people's willingness to move to another city or area is much greater than previously assumed. Based on an extrapolation, only 107,600 - 15.1 percent - of the 711,400 persons who were registered as seeking a training place last year applied to companies more than 100 kilometres (66 miles) away from their home. This figure cannot however be viewed as a measure of their willingness to move to another city or region per se. For obvious reasons, young people prefer to undergo training close to their particular town and apply to companies outside their area only when their chances of finding an apprenticeship or traineeship locally are slim. Consequently, the shares of training place-seekers who do not limit their applications to their particular region vary considerably from state to state. In Baden-Württemberg which has an above-average number of training places to offer, this share is only 7.8 percent. By comparison, this figure is 39.8 percent in Brandenburg. As a rule, the tighter the local apprenticeship market is, the greater the willingness to move to another city or area. Statistical simulations suggest that approximately half of all applicants in sparsely populated rural areas with a maximum of 50 in-company training places per 100 training place-seekers look outside their local area for a training place. Incidentally, young women are markedly more willing to move than young men are.
According to vocational guidance statistics, some 44,000 young people reported success with applying farther afield and began training outside the district serviced by their local employment office in 2002. In the process they helped level out regional imbalances in the supply of and demand for training places. However, this mobility can also place pressure on individual regional markets.

Hamburg provides a good example of this. Last year, Hamburg's training place market absorbed some 2,000 applicants from outside. The Hamburg training place market draw people from an area that extends from Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania all the way to Upper Lusatia (please see Chart 4). By contrast, only 38 young people from Hamburg took up a training place outside the Hanseatic city. As a result of this sizable net immigration, the number of training places offered by Hamburg's commerce and industry was not large enough to satisfy the demand generated by the city's own school-leavers.

Looking at statistics alone, Hamburg has an above-average number of training places to offer its young people. However, the strong pressure that the "immigrants" exerted on the market led to a situation which placed Hamburg in the ranks of western Germany's most serious problem regions.

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Chart 5

Number of school-leavers through 2010: Growth in the west, sharp decline in the east
Germany's training place market will continue to develop quite differently in the eastern part of the country than in the western part in the years to come - for demographic reasons. In Germany's eastern states the number of young people who have completed their education at schools offering a general education will fall by more than half in some cases. By contrast, demand is expected to continue to grow in most parts of western Germany (please see Chart 5). As a consequence, the situation on the west German training place market is not likely to improve.

A decline in the number of "commuters" from Germany's eastern states will probably alleviate the problem only in part. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent this "training commuting" will reverse direction in the coming years, and lead to a growing number of young people from western Germany trying to find an apprenticeship or traineeship in one of the country's eastern states. The sharp drop in the number of school-leavers is sure to develop into an enormous problem for companies in eastern Germany. This will be even more the case when a large share of today's working force reaches retirement age and has to be replaced by a new generation of qualified workers.

Author: Dr. Joachim Gerd Ulrich, Section: Need analyses, Training supply and demand

Further reading:

•  Bundesanstalt für Arbeit (Federal Employment Services) (2003): Arbeitsmarkt in Zahlen. Ausbildungsvermittlung. Ratsuchende und Bewerber, Berufsausbildungsstellen. Berichtsjahr 2002/2003. Nuremburg: Bundesanstalt für Arbeit. 
  Available at: http://www.pub.arbeitsamt.de/hst/services/statistik/detail/h.html 
• Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2003): Berufsbildungsbericht 2003 (Report on Vocational Education and Training for the Year 2003). Bonn, BMBF. In particular, Part II, Ch. 1.3.2: Situation von Bewerbern und Bewerberinnen, die nach der Verbleibstatistik der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit nicht in eine duale Berufsausbildung einmündeten. pp. 70-72. (Part I of this report is also available in English.)
  Available at: http://www.berufsbildungsbericht.info/ 
• Ulrich, Joachim Gerd; Ehrenthal, Bettina; Eden, Andreas; Rebhan, Volker (2002): Ohne Lehre in die Leere? Ergebnisse der BIBB/BA-Bewerberbefragung 2001. In: Informationen für die Beratungs- und Vermittlungsdienste (ibv), No. 27/02 from July 3, 2002, pp. 2.119-2.198.
  Available at: http://www.bibb.de/redaktion/erste_schwelle/3_2003/meldung3_2003.htm 
• Ulrich, Joachim Gerd; Troltsch, Klaus (2003): Stabilisierung des Lehrstellenmarktes unter wirtschaftlich schwierigen Rahmenbedingungen? Aktuelle Analysen der Berufsberatungsstatistik zur Lage auf dem Ausbildungsstellenmarkt (Forschung Spezial, H. 5). Bielefeld: Bertelsmann. 
• Ulrich, Joachim Gerd (2003): Ergänzende Hinweise aus der Lehrstellenbewerberbefragung 2002 zur Interpretation der Berufsbildungsstatistik: das Problem der latenten Nachfrage. In: Informationen für die Beratungs- und Vermittlungsdienste (ibv), No. 13/03 from June 25, 2003, pp. 1.775 -1.784. 
  Available at:
  http://www.arbeitsamt.de/hst/services/bsw/ausbverm/
  veroeffentlichungen/ausbildungsmarkt/index.html

Erscheinungsdatum und Hinweis Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Publication on the Internet: November 4, 2003

URN: urn:nbn:de:0035-0083-6

Die Deutsche Bibliothek has archived the electronic publication "Looking to an upswing", which is now permanently available on the archive server of Die Deutsche Bibliothek.

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Last modified on: November 22, 2011