Too few skilled workers, too few trainees – at the same time more and more young people without school, training or a job. Would a training guarantee help? Austria is showing the way.
One in seven young adults between the ages of 20 and 34 has no vocational training. Secondary school students are particularly affected by this fate. Job centers and other authorities cannot approach these young people. Young people like Toni. He was born in Offenbach, Hesse, went to school here and has Italian roots. The 23-year-old crashed after his mother’s death and lived on the streets or with friends. Toni has been living in emergency accommodation for three years and receives community benefit.
He completed secondary school seven years ago. Since then, Toni has been involved in various further training measures at the job center. Without success. The social worker Zakari Gammour has been working with Toni for four months. The 51-year-old is part of the “Joblinge” initiative, which wants to support people like Toni. “It’s about reaching people who are difficult for the system to reach. What exactly is needed is very individual.” Gammour is supposed to help Toni find training. To do this, he first needs his own apartment.
More and more apprenticeships are unfilled
More and more young people share Toni’s fate – at the same time the number of open training positions is increasing. According to the Bertelsmann Foundation, 68,990 apprenticeship positions offered nationwide remained unfilled in 2022 – a new high. The number of 15- to 24-year-olds who neither go to school nor complete training or have a job is estimated at 630,000. 60 percent of them are young men like Toni.
“The risk of becoming unemployed as an unskilled person is six times higher than if you have a vocational qualification,” says education expert Clemens Wieland from the Bertelsmann Foundation. “These people often end up in long-term unemployment or precarious employment. And that is a big loss for the economy.” The shortage of skilled workers sends greetings.
There are ideas about how more young people can get training. The Bertelsmann Foundation has transferred the Austrian training guarantee model to Germany. Result: Around 20,000 additional skilled workers would be available to the economy.
A guarantee has its costs
The model works like this: Anyone who cannot find an apprenticeship in Austria completes a ten-week career preparation course. During this time, the Austrian employment agency is trying intensively to place people with companies. Anyone who still comes away empty-handed can do so-called inter-company training in an educational institution. At the same time, attempts are constantly being made to place students in regular training. In the end, young people who complete their entire training in an educational institution also receive a qualification. They often live in a trainee dormitory throughout the entire period.
This form of training guarantee obviously costs: around 72,000 euros per person per year. But education expert Wieland finds this justifiable. As each young person receives more training, unemployment falls, personal income rises – and with it the overall level of education and economic performance.
“It’s a win-win situation,” says Wieland and calls for the model to be used in Germany too. “In any case, it is important to provide young people with good, personal, individual support. Especially those who have weaker school performance often do not have such good support from their parents.”
Right to trainee place planned
Germany wants to take a first step towards a training guarantee from August 2024. Young people should then have the right to a training place for the first time. But criticism of the adopted model is growing. Wieland also sees weaknesses: “The core of the training guarantee is this provision of additional external training places. And that only works in very specific cases, namely in regions where there is an acute shortage of training places. And that is not enough.”
Cases like Toni would fall through the cracks again here. Because the individual support that social worker Gammour offers through the “Joblings” is missing from the model adopted by the federal government. This is crucial. “He was the first to ask me what direction I wanted to go in,” says Toni about Gammour. “Everyone else just put you in somewhere, as long as you’re out of the ‘unemployed’ category.”
Thanks to the individual support, Toni is now on the right track, has completed an internship from start to finish and wants to stick with it. He now knows that without training there is no future.