A powerful and honest signal of equivalence is needed!

Dear readers

Our future vision of Germany as a business location lies at the core of current economic policy debates. While the consequences of digitalisation and decarbonisation are increasingly being reflected in our occupational profiles, Germany primarily remains an industrial location for now. Both industrial occupations and craft trade occupations in particular are seeing a growth in the significance of their services. This is making vocational education and training more demanding. The importance of unskilled work is declining.

This is also one of the reasons why the demographically driven shortage of skilled workers will exacerbate in many occupations, especially in those which are relevant to the transformation. On the labour market, we will be confronted with an increasing quantitative problem and with a qualitative problem too. The cause of this is an educational trend towards the upper secondary school-leaving certificate and higher education study which has been developing over decades and is associated with a preference for occupations which go beyond dual or advanced training. Our current projections indicate that the number of graduates will continue to rise. By way of contrast, there will be a decline in the number of persons who have completed a vocational qualification or upgrading training.

The “advancement through education” promise of the 1960s was probably the most crucial policy impetus for such a trend. This tendency has been magnified by the OECD’s erroneous categorisation of higher VET over the years. School leaving qualifications determine recruitment pathways to a certain degree, and this has led to the present problematic imbalance: a constant increase in entrants to higher education study accompanied by a significant fall in the numbers of new training contracts being concluded. The appreciable rise in the number of young people dropping out of their higher education course is an additional factor. As well as resulting in a considerable macroeconomic financial burden, this is also inducing much frustration and pessimistic future scenarios for young people.

To put it in a nutshell. If industry and the craft trades are to continue to be main future pillars of our economic location alongside the services sector, then we urgently need to ensure greater attractiveness of vocational education and training. To this end, it will be necessary to undertake a qualitative readjustment of educational streams with the aim of regaining societal recognition of the dual occupations. And the best way to achieve this will be for us to create greater transparency in respect of the educational value of occupations in our society. This requires a powerful and honest signal in the form of political acknowledgement of the equivalence of vocational and academic education.

We could draw lessons from Switzerland, where the notion of equivalence is mandated in the Federal Constitution. The Swiss National Qualifications Framework is statutorily regulated for this purpose. Austria also has a Qualifications Framework enshrined in law. Vocational training pathways and qualifications thus enjoy a high level of esteem in both these countries. Apart from introducing a constitutional provision, a suitable measure for implementation in Germany would be a dedicated DQR (German Qualifications Framework) law, which could be passed by the Federal Government and the federal states in the form of a state treaty. This would then establish binding regulations for aspects such as areas of responsibility, procedures, financing and deadlines in line with the Austrian model. Such a law would render the DQR “citable” and enable it to be more easily explained and disseminated in society. A statutory provision would also facilitate more effective action against misuse of the DQR. This too is urgently necessary!

Professor Friedrich Hubert Esser
President of BIBB

Translation from the German original (published in BWP 1/2025): Martin Kelsey, GlobalSprachTeam, Berlin