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在线翻译:
szdaily -> World Economy -> 
Unpopular training exacerbating Germany’s labor shortage
    2018-07-30  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

NINA LOREA KLEY urgently needs young people to train as vehicle builders at her company’s factories in northern and eastern Germany. She has enough orders and money to hire 20 this summer but can only find 14.

Feldbinder makes 2,000 customized trailers, railway wagons and containers a year but won’t be able to keep that up without new recruits, especially because many employees are due to retire in the next few years.

“If we don’t manage to fill jobs that become free, we’ll have to think about which orders we can fulfill,” said Kley, 41, a managing director at the firm her father co-founded four decades ago. “We simply wouldn’t be able to take on certain orders anymore due to a lack of staff.”

Feldbinder is not alone. More than a third of German companies could not fill all of their training places last year while almost one in 10 received no applications for such roles, a survey by the DIHK Chambers of Commerce found. Last year, the number of vacancies for training positions was at its highest for more than 20 years.

Germany’s twin-track vocational training system, which involves up to 3-1/2 years of on-the-job learning in firms alongside theory lessons at vocational school, is credited with giving Germany the European Union’s lowest youth jobless rate — 6.8 percent in 2017 against an EU average of 16.8 percent.

Widely admired abroad, the training system is being exported in various forms to Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States. But its popularity is waning at home as young people increasingly prefer the higher status of a university degree.

That could hurt growth in Europe’s largest economy by exacerbating a skilled labor shortage, which is partly caused by hundreds of thousands of aging employees leaving the labor market every year.

“It’s a dangerous trend — Germany is running out of skilled workers,” said DIHK president Eric Schweitzer. “At first, orders lie around for longer, then firms have to reject them outright — to the point where entire sectors run into problems.”

Many firms are also preparing for a mass exit of experienced employees from 2020 as the post-World War II baby boomers retire. There are around 300,000 fewer school leavers each year than people going into retirement, the DIHK said.

Kley said Feldbinder would have more people retiring in two to three years than it would be able to replace with its own trainees. (SD-Agencies)

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