I was recently a guest on a discussion show. The moderator explained that there are currently only 70,000 people with a Blue Card in the country. Their conclusion: The Skilled Immigration Act passed in 2020 does not work and needs to be improved. That irritated me.
Of course, 70,000 skilled workers are a drop in the bucket. In the next three years alone, 2.2 million more workers will retire than young people will enter the labor market. I agree with the description of the problem.
However, the conclusion “The law needs to be improved” is insufficient. In 2012, youth unemployment in Spain and Greece rose to over 50 percent. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow Europeans left their homes to look for a job with us.
They were all EU citizens and thus automatically had a residence and work permit. Almost all were young, well educated, highly motivated – and unsuccessful. The vast majority of young Europeans who came to Berlin or Munich back then left Germany after just three months.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
One of the reasons for this is overt and covert xenophobia. Quite a lot of international specialists tell me that they are threatened as foreigners in East Germany. “Rostock-Lichtenhagen” or “Pegida” are terms that interested specialists have also heard in Brazil and India.
Word also gets around that we as a nation are otherwise very unfriendly. Internations, an organization for expatriates, asks its members every year: “How welcome do you feel in your host country?” Year after year, Germany comes off like it did at Eurovision: in one of the last three places. And the professionals are leaving.
Only four percent of all German companies post job advertisements in English
The most important reason why we fail to attract international skilled workers is another: Thousands of international skilled workers write to me about their experiences of looking for a job in Germany. Almost everyone says: There are hardly any jobs in English.
An analysis using the Jobfeed database shows that only four percent of all German companies post job advertisements in English. Worse still, half of all English-language job advertisements come from just 350 companies.
International specialists who are interested in Germany have the choice between the plague and cholera: If they apply to purely German-speaking employers, they will be rejected due to “lack of language skills”. If they apply to English-speaking companies in the Federal Republic, they compete with thousands of other applicants. The chance of getting a job is therefore tiny.
>> Read here: Large survey shows who really wants to come to Germany
The OECD recently surveyed 30,000 visitors to the federal government’s skilled labor portal. When asked: “What are the biggest obstacles to coming to Germany?”, 55 percent answered: “No job offer” and 45 percent: “Unsure how to find a job.” Those were the two most common answers.
80 percent of our recruiting problems can be traced back to a single point: those who work internationally communicate in English.
We Germans suffer from a blind spot in the global search for talent. We never wonder how international professionals decide. These people don’t come to Germany to solve our problems, but to advance their own careers.
In most professions, German can only be learned on the job
They go where the best offer beckons. That can be Germany, but also France, the UK, the Netherlands or Singapore. How would you act if you were in the position of these professionals? Would you learn all four languages? So French, Dutch, German and Chinese – just in case? no They act rationally: they only learn the local language once the employment contract has been signed.
What is the solution? Companies that want to strategically overcome the skills shortage hire in English and teach the local language on the job. Contrary to what some claim, this is possible in most professions.
To do this, employers only have to be aware of which part of a position really creates value – and which tasks are secondary. For example, I often hear the objection: “We engineers speak English. But the colleagues also have to talk to the workers on the assembly line – and they only speak German.” The idea of using Google Translate or simply hiring an intern to translate – they never thought of it.
German employers stop at the description of the problem. Finding solutions seems to be too much for them. That needs to change.
The author:
Chris Pyak is a career coach for international professionals.
More: Skilled Immigration – Which reforms the federal government is planning in concrete terms