Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB)

Covering company qualification requirements

Covering company skilled worker qualification requirements in growing employment fields

The essential aim of this research project is an empirical survey of forms of coverage of skilled worker qualification requirements and of the underlying decision-making processes currently practised by companies operating in growing employment fields. The objective is to use this survey as a basis for investigating opportunities for the introduction, support and structuring of initial and continuing training and for competence development in these areas. The results will provide indications of the attractiveness of the dual system for growing employment areas, and the intention is to process these results and make them available to regulation-related qualifications research and to the regulatory work conducted within BIBB.

The initial focus is on the identification of differences in the ways in which company qualification requirements are covered and of the factors which determine such differences. The aim then is to use this analysis as a basis for the drawing up of a typology of company behaviour. This will be followed by an investigation into the influence exerted by company staff coverage strategies on willingness to provide training and on the structure of initial and continuing training. The investigation will also include an analysis of informal forms of continuing training which are significant to growing employment fields and of the opportunities available to companies to build up competence and knowledge. In addition to this, a further aim is to investigate whether companies link in to forms of regulated continuing training in this regard and in which way continuing vocational training displays connectivity with the observable structuring of development and upgrading opportunities in the companies or how such connectivity can be established. A particular objective is to shed light on how extra-company recruitment patterns and human resources strategies favour and trigger competition and substitutions between training and continuing training courses (e.g. dual training versus school-based and higher education training, higher education training versus dual higher education training, continuing and advanced vocational training versus higher education training).