Anyone who has tried to get a handyman in the past few months knows it. The same applies to those who are stuck in the baggage or handling chaos at the airport. Or who stood in front of the closed door in the restaurant: today is a day off due to a lack of staff. There is a shortage of skilled workers in Germany. Recruiters call it a “battle for talent.”
This is also reflected in the job advertisements. From January to June, employers advertised more than 5.4 million jobs across Germany. That is significantly more than in the same period in the past two years, which were still heavily influenced by the pandemic and the partial lockdowns, but also 14 percent more than in the first six months of 2019, i.e. the year before the corona pandemic, results from the most recent job market evaluation of the index advertisement data, the largest job advertisement database in Europe. Job advertisements published in 249 print media, on 349 online job exchanges and 136,000 company websites as well as in the job portal of the Federal Employment Agency were analyzed.
This year, the monthly number of advertised positions was stable between around 1.2 and 1.4 million positions. Anyone who has learned a suitable trade or another profession they are looking for can choose from over a million jobs. From January to June this year, most of the job offers were aimed at the following professionals: construction workers and craftsmen (almost 1.2 million positions), technical professionals such as engineers and architects (around one million positions) and salespeople (almost 886,000 positions). Another recently published study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection from the German Economic Institute (IW) shows that craftsmen in particular who have completed their vocational training are increasingly in short supply on the labor market. The “skills gap” last year was 75,452 journeymen. In addition, 7239 master craftsman positions could not be filled.
According to the index, most of the advertised positions were in North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria in the first half of the year, each with around 1.2 million jobs. In the city ranking, Berlin was at the top with more than 436,000 positions, well ahead of Munich with almost 280,000 jobs and Hamburg with more than 25,000. Former SPD chairman Sigmar Gabriel suggested in an interview with the picture on sunday before extending the weekly working hours to combat the shortage of skilled workers: “Wouldn’t it be better if we let people earn more by working a little longer?”