Foreigners to Boost German Job Training

Germany's education ministry, the German Chamber of Commerce and 14 international business associations agreed Wednesday on an initiative to raise the number of official training positions offered for young "foreigners" living in Germany.

Turkish companies on the whole are economically very successful, but have done relatively little by way of creating training jobs, said Kemal Sahin, president of the German-Turkish Chamber of Commerce.

"(Turkish firms) have created 350,000 jobs," he said. "But for future workers they haven't done much. Their quota of training positions is under 6 percent. So, there a long way still to go."

Bilingual personnel needed

Foreign companies are especially in need of bilingual workers who have knowledge of different cultures. If despite this need they fail to train more workers it is because they don't know any better, said Salvatore Condipodaro, who is in charge of an association of Italian companies.

"As (foreign) businesses, we laid our foundation based on what we brought with us when we came to Germany -- our own system of training, which was nonexistent," he said. "We didn't learn enough about the way things are done here. That's why there hasn't been more done here so far."

Navigating the system

Many foreign companies simply do not know about Germany's so-called "dual system," in which an official, state-sanctioned training position is offered in combination with attendance at a vocational school. Others were either intimidated by the thought of jumping through the necessary bureaucratic hoops to attain the right to a training position, or Ausbildungsberechtigung, or else they simply didn't want to bother.

In recent time, the rules pertaining to such training positions have been relaxed. Nonetheless, for many foreign firms, it simply doesn't occur to them to offer official training positions.

Irina Bernstein, a Russian businesswoman who works in media and advertising, explained how difficult it is to find qualified bilingual workers. She finally began offering training positions when she found herself in a dire situation.

"I have to say, it was very easy for us to get the official go-ahead to offer the training positions," she said. "The Berlin Chamber of Commerce supported us, which made it really easy. Now we have three training positions, and we get trainees who are studying to work in administrative jobs."

Too little investment

In the opinion of German Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn, many more foreign firms should follow Bernstein's example. The benefit would be that such companies would need to hire "foreign" Germans, meaning immigrants or the children of immigrants (even if the latter may have been born in the country). "Foreign" youths generally have a much lower rate of finding training positions.

"I find it extremely unfortunate that such a great percentage of young immigrants aren't trained," Bulmahn said. "The amount of training we invest in these young people is simply too little. It is in their own interest to get a training position, but it is also in the interest of our economy to give them a chance to train."

The education minister strongly supports the initiative of the German-Turkish Chamber of Commerce in its recently announced attempt to create 1,000 new training positions in Turkish firms. Especially given its export-oriented economy, Germany needs trained multicultural workers, and in the long run, training positions serve to aid integration.