Successfully ensuring a supply of skilled workers – VET is part of the solution!

Dear readers,

Securing a supply of skilled workers is one of the key future tasks for our country. Despite the poor economic situation, there is scarcely a company or a sector which is not reporting shortages. Demographic change acts as an amplifier of this process. Around one third of the working population will retire over the next ten years, with the number of occupations with demonstrable bottlenecks set to rise at the same time. The technical, craft trades and IT occupations which are indispensable for the economic and ecological transformation will be especially affected. Even high net immigration can only cushion this decline rather than offset it. For this reason, we need to tap into all potential for the labour market.

Vocational education and training has a core part to play in particular, but it too is increasingly coming under pressure. The number of trainees has been falling for years, and many companies are either withdrawing from training or are unable to fill training places. The latest results from the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB), which indicate a decline in the learning achievements of our young people, are particularly concerning. It will be difficult for many of them to progress to fully qualifying VET. Even today, about 250,000 young people are entering the transitional sector, and only around two thirds of these later make the leap into training. This situation is in danger of worsening. There are already just under three million people aged 20 to 34 without a vocational qualification. This is a no-go for Germany as an economic centre!

It means the risk that a growing proportion of young people will fail to find their way into qualified employment is increasing. The consequences for their chances of participation and for our economic performance will be severe. Securing a supply of skilled workers therefore also always means improving education and training and integration opportunities before gaps become permanent.

Once again, it will be important to systematically align VET to meet people where they are in terms of their learning requirements. To this end and to accompany fully qualifying training programmes, we need more modular structures, partial qualifications, additional qualifications, and solutions which facilitate horizontal and vertical transitions. These allow gradual progression to training and employment for young people with weaker levels of prior learning and, for example, also for career changers, refugees, and higher education drop-outs.

Greater flexibility also demands modernisation of our regulatory instruments. Procedures must become faster and more agile. They need to contain less detailed regulation whilst offering more scope for pedagogical shaping.

Dual VET can only fulfil this role if it is resilient enough to react to new challenges and flexible, inclusive and excellent enough to leverage all areas of potential in our society for the labour market. Securing the supply of qualified workers thus becomes an overall societal commitment. Trade and industry, policy making, vocational schools, chambers and the social partners all need to work together with the academic research sector to open up sustainable educational and training pathways for young people and to reach those who have so far fallen through the cracks. Germany is facing major challenges. Vocational education and training can be part of the solution. It is crucial for us to become faster, take bolder action, and to organise the necessary radical change with determination. Another thing is clear too. The successful recruitment of skilled workers will be achieved by consistency, not by waiting for it to happen.

Professor Friedrich Hubert Esser
President of BIBB

Translation from the German original (published in BWP 1/2026): Martin Kelsey, GlobalSprachTeam, Berlin