Comparable story as in many countries (in the Netherlands its comparable); they want cheap people, ideally pay them an unlivable wage and have them fully depend on the employer so they are trapped.
To illustrate how it works in the Netherlands (as we drunk even more of the ‘free market’ kool-aid as types like Friedrich Merz did); 30% income tax breaks on immigrants hired from abroad and paid over 50k/year so they can aggressively undercut wages and apply wage suppression on the locals. Lower paid labour comes with ‘housing’ (read a bed in a slum for 700 euros a month), as there is a delebitately caused housing ‘crisis’ those people can’t move neither switch employers as they’ll be kicked out straight away.
They don’t want workers, they want slaves.
Because the locals don’t want to lose their jobs to foreigners. The insecurity is real.
IT specialists != CS juniors
Also yes, plenty of fields of work who hire people if they can get hold of them (because they cannot find them).
High skilled workers don’t want to, and shouldn’t, work for peanuts.
Because news like to bend the reality a bit,
there is a shortage in some work areas, mainly healthcare, elderly care and in some trade skill jobs.
But IT definitely doesn’t have a shortage.
Companies usualy like to scream that there is a worker shortage but the only real shortage they see is a shortage in cheap wage slaves they can exploit.
So while the reality is that there is some shortage, the news outlets just decide to listen to the big corporations which say shit like that.
My company is firing people to outsource their jobs to cheap non european countries.
Unless the government does something to protect the local workforce, the money will slowly drain out of the country.
They are not missing skilled workers, they are missing cheap skilled workers.
Because of the disparity between skills and demand, many people are struggling to find jobs, and companies are struggling to find people with certain skills. E.g. there is a huge gap in all medical areas, and in IT, some skills are quite difficult to find because it’s not just about getting training but also having actual experience in the field.
Because the german goverment is slow as fuck. They just try, to fix a 2020 problem in 2026. Around 2028-2029, they will understand that there is no more demand in IT people and in 2030 they will stop talking about the shortage.
Because Germany is missing skilled workers with German language skills and recognized training and education that are willing to work in certain areas.
There is a shortage of skilled workers, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to enter the labor market as a foreigner.
The bureaucracy behind this is one of the reasons of the shortage.
Well, one of the problems is: While we might have the amount of skilled workers on paper, most of them aren’t willing to relocate to where skilled work is to be utilized. Those areas are at times less desirable to live in for a variety of reasons, some of them being poor infrastucture, lower wages and/or lower living standards due to a lack of investments in property.
For companies, it’s cheaper to demand foreign talent that will work for less, as the alternative would be paying German qualified personnel a premium on top of their salary to relocate.
CEOs need cheap laborers as competitors at the workforce market to dump wages for the natives who want fair shares and higher wages. Additionally, politicians need migration to avoid having to deal with the highly emotional topic of family. The modern migration benefits the rich and powerful, the rest of us suffers from it.
They wanted to say slaves from 3rd world countries that is what they wanna imply there lol
Office jobs can still pick and choose, anything related to Handwerk is struggling
The news outlet is correct.
But hiring those professionals is also a question of money.
We have three million unemployed people in Germany, yet the government and industry claim there‘s a worker shortage so people should work longer hours. Go figure
Because its propaganda. If there is shortage then immigration are justified…
They want the 19 year old with 20 years of work experience that of course has a masters degree that works for minimum wage.
Or people that are okay with bait and switches.
Annekdote like a year ago I had an interview for a Level 2 IT Support role : 80% Homeoffice – 20 % Office (way to the office from my home would have been 20km so basically on the other side of Hamburg) – 50-85k gross / year
Well it turns out they wanted a Level 1 – Level 2 and Level 3 Support, that is willing to do on call support 4-5 times a year on weekends (because we are on tradeshows like 4-5 times per year), helps with hiring as a temporal team lead in IT and is okay with 50.
And yeah about that Homeoffice.
We want you 4 times a week in office but we allow up to 4 days per month home office (with the caveat that we don’t want home office on mondays, fridays, tuesdays or wednesdays. And if either tuesday or thursday is a public holiday no homeoffice on wednesday either.).
I demanded 55 for the first year and got told I was way too expensive and they found someone cheaper… Given that offer turned up 6 times between indeed, workwise, stepstone and workwise since then like every quarter the cheaper option probably did not work out.
Skill means many years or decades of experience. The ones complaining are fresh graduates or fairly junior people, or skilled experienced once who got laid off in large corporates with 180k annual income who can’t find anything in the same range anymore.
It’s not about “different opinions”. On Reddit you see the side of workers not finding a job, while on the news you read about enterprises not finding workers. It’s happening both.
For IT it’s only certain niches.
No, Germany is not lacking skilled workers. Germany is lacking skilled workers that are willing to work for a salary of an unskilled worker and who also want to do the work of an entire team by themselves.
There’s a shortage of people willing to do work that is considered unattractive:
– Lots of late shifts or night shifts;
– Located in rural areas;
– Low salary (especially when combined with required certification);
– Stressful people jobs like nursing or being a kindergarden or elementary school teacher;
– Jobs where you have career alternatives with higher salaries on similar qualifications, like being a STEM teacher at school.
“shortage of workers” in Germany is always code for “We do not like the wages we have to pay people and would like more applicants, so we can lower wages.”
The IT shortage only relates to experienced specialists, people asking here would be juniors straight out of the university with limited German skills, nobody is looking for them here.
And now Europe made a deal with India for easy work access… Let’s see how this will impact our job pool😅
I generally assume this is just ragebait, no one in their right mind can possibly claim that there is a shortage of it workers in germany
yeah thats bullshit. It should read “Germany is facing massice shortage of skilled workers, from nurses to IT specialists, who have 10+ years of work experience and are willing to work for ~40k/year in cities like Munich/Berlin … “
Their is no worker shortage but a shortage of slaves.
Companys dont want to pay a living wage and germans dont want foreinger labour because it pushes down the wages. Good example are truckdrivers the salary went down so much compared to the cost of living its crazy.
Thats goes for most jobs where good german is not needed.
Germany is facing a massive shortage of CHEAP skilled workers.
The headlines don’t tell the fact that German companies are not willing to pay a fair wage.
Missing context here are – 1) missing “cheap” and “disposable” labour, i.e. legal slavery, 2) Job market and soceity here is not ready for integrating these skilled workers. Yes, integration is a two-way street. 3) C2 German insistance from day 0 does not help with 2). 4) Some skilled workforce is actually over-qualified for the current requirements..
I am sure there is more that we do not see or notice, but there are many reasons for this mismatch of experienced and reported reality. And over simplification of the issue does not help..
Germany has an abundance of skilled workers lacking the skills the market needs and at the same time struggles to attract talent from abroad with the skills and experience the economy needs. Hence unemployment rates are on the rise while the shortage of skilled workers remains.
There are areas where everyone says thefe are shkrtages. But, on Reddit often geniuses are complaining who expect 100k /year upwards as normal salary, with complete homeoffice as soon as they learned to tie their shoelaces.Everything else is only “cheap labor”.
E.g. people complain whose jobs are easily off- / near shored.
Reddit expectations do not meet reality. The shortage is in senior positions, who earn well and have no issues in finding new jobs..
A fresh graduate isn’t a skilled worker, not yet. And skilled workers – where? Metal? Construction? Chem industries? DW, in its generalization, rather harms than helps.
Let’s say you have a 200 people that are considered skilled carpenters for example. There are 125 jobs searching for carpenters and 75 jobs searching for nurses. In theory there’s a job for everyone but in reality carpenters can’t find work they’re qualified for while health care can’t find enough qualified nurses. There’s too much on one end and too little on the other. You want to make an apple pie but the store only has oranges left
the truth is, germany is lacking skilled workers that they can only pay 30k a year….
Because of Drama. They dont need “skilled” workers, they need “cheap” workers. And because no one wants to be exploited they take in people from poor countries that are willing to work for less. Thats the whole magic here.
They have the shortage, cause they dont want to pay the trained people what they are worth. Simple as that. With a Masters Degree i now look at the salary that Bachelors Degree wouldnt even look at 5 years ago.
German language is the most hurdle.
Germany is facing a shortage in certain areas. We have plenty of HR. What we don’t have? Nurses doctors and Handwerker. And all of those we proper language skills and the correct certifications.
That is hard to come by if a country makes having babies too expensive. So you outsource having kids into foreign countries.
That being said, getting this right is hard. Like really hard. Ive seen it in our hospitals and doctors offices. Everywhere you look, foreigners. If said foreigner doesn’t speak your complicated language well enough with a patient in need. That creates incredible friction and frustration on both sides.
Adding our incredible taxes. Yeah. Makes attracting good people hard. And I say. Please come. Most of us are nice.
Bc the news channels are lying. It’s that simple. No one wants to pay for skilled workers anymore.
They need huge amount of 20 somethings with two decades of high level work expertise, willing to work 60+ hours for €12 or less and ready to manage the company after management could not decide. It is of course understood that writing down said hours beyond 40 hours is not happening. In addition 24/7 phone availability is mandatory. 50 and above need not apply. Also foreign workers are not welcome. /s
Anecdotes are not the same as aggregate data, and there is a distinction between the macro and micro economy.
There are shortages in specific sectors in specific regions requiring specific skills at specific salary grades.
The people complaining on here do not fulfil at least one of those criteria, therefore end up either under-or unemployed. Labour is not perfectly substitutable. So where there is a glut of workers in one sector, that does not mean those workers can be deployed in another (if they even wanted to).
Two things can be true, Germany has an overall staff shortage, at the same time Germany has over-saturation of applicants in specific fields that do little to address the first point.
Because it is true. For instance nurses: You can be the best trained and skilled nurse from your country. But here in Germany you lack qualification from a bearocratic pov. So you have to do extra training and tests and are only allowed to work as a “stupid” nursing helper which can be really frustrating, when you know what to do.
Pretty much everyone is saying this, though? For nurses it’s pretty straight forward, for IT it highly depends on the specific field, because some are oversaturated already.
However, the economy demanding “more skilled workers” doesn’t necessarily mean there are too few, but that there isn’t “enough” competition from an employer point of view.
An experienced IT person will not work for minimum wage. He will also spot bullshit and will likely call it out.
Someone new to the field will not match their expectations.
Nurses are indeed a problem – badly treated, badly paid and now they’re surprised nobody wants to work in the field.
Completely homegrown problems.
We need more workers than we got now because of the many old people (Boomers) retiring soon.
Because german leaders hate you and Europe 😉
The main issue is communication like these. We lack skilled workers, but not in IT
The blue collar worker area faces most of the shortage. People are not even willing to come for small works now a days
48 comments
The missing word is ‘cheap’.
Comparable story as in many countries (in the Netherlands its comparable); they want cheap people, ideally pay them an unlivable wage and have them fully depend on the employer so they are trapped.
To illustrate how it works in the Netherlands (as we drunk even more of the ‘free market’ kool-aid as types like Friedrich Merz did); 30% income tax breaks on immigrants hired from abroad and paid over 50k/year so they can aggressively undercut wages and apply wage suppression on the locals. Lower paid labour comes with ‘housing’ (read a bed in a slum for 700 euros a month), as there is a delebitately caused housing ‘crisis’ those people can’t move neither switch employers as they’ll be kicked out straight away.
They don’t want workers, they want slaves.
Because the locals don’t want to lose their jobs to foreigners. The insecurity is real.
IT specialists != CS juniors
Also yes, plenty of fields of work who hire people if they can get hold of them (because they cannot find them).
High skilled workers don’t want to, and shouldn’t, work for peanuts.
Because news like to bend the reality a bit,
there is a shortage in some work areas, mainly healthcare, elderly care and in some trade skill jobs.
But IT definitely doesn’t have a shortage.
Companies usualy like to scream that there is a worker shortage but the only real shortage they see is a shortage in cheap wage slaves they can exploit.
So while the reality is that there is some shortage, the news outlets just decide to listen to the big corporations which say shit like that.
My company is firing people to outsource their jobs to cheap non european countries.
Unless the government does something to protect the local workforce, the money will slowly drain out of the country.
They are not missing skilled workers, they are missing cheap skilled workers.
Because of the disparity between skills and demand, many people are struggling to find jobs, and companies are struggling to find people with certain skills. E.g. there is a huge gap in all medical areas, and in IT, some skills are quite difficult to find because it’s not just about getting training but also having actual experience in the field.
Because the german goverment is slow as fuck. They just try, to fix a 2020 problem in 2026. Around 2028-2029, they will understand that there is no more demand in IT people and in 2030 they will stop talking about the shortage.
Because Germany is missing skilled workers with German language skills and recognized training and education that are willing to work in certain areas.
There is a shortage of skilled workers, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to enter the labor market as a foreigner.
The bureaucracy behind this is one of the reasons of the shortage.
Well, one of the problems is: While we might have the amount of skilled workers on paper, most of them aren’t willing to relocate to where skilled work is to be utilized. Those areas are at times less desirable to live in for a variety of reasons, some of them being poor infrastucture, lower wages and/or lower living standards due to a lack of investments in property.
For companies, it’s cheaper to demand foreign talent that will work for less, as the alternative would be paying German qualified personnel a premium on top of their salary to relocate.
CEOs need cheap laborers as competitors at the workforce market to dump wages for the natives who want fair shares and higher wages. Additionally, politicians need migration to avoid having to deal with the highly emotional topic of family. The modern migration benefits the rich and powerful, the rest of us suffers from it.
They wanted to say slaves from 3rd world countries that is what they wanna imply there lol
Office jobs can still pick and choose, anything related to Handwerk is struggling
The news outlet is correct.
But hiring those professionals is also a question of money.
We have three million unemployed people in Germany, yet the government and industry claim there‘s a worker shortage so people should work longer hours. Go figure
Because its propaganda. If there is shortage then immigration are justified…
They want the 19 year old with 20 years of work experience that of course has a masters degree that works for minimum wage.
Or people that are okay with bait and switches.
Annekdote like a year ago I had an interview for a Level 2 IT Support role : 80% Homeoffice – 20 % Office (way to the office from my home would have been 20km so basically on the other side of Hamburg) – 50-85k gross / year
Well it turns out they wanted a Level 1 – Level 2 and Level 3 Support, that is willing to do on call support 4-5 times a year on weekends (because we are on tradeshows like 4-5 times per year), helps with hiring as a temporal team lead in IT and is okay with 50.
And yeah about that Homeoffice.
We want you 4 times a week in office but we allow up to 4 days per month home office (with the caveat that we don’t want home office on mondays, fridays, tuesdays or wednesdays. And if either tuesday or thursday is a public holiday no homeoffice on wednesday either.).
I demanded 55 for the first year and got told I was way too expensive and they found someone cheaper… Given that offer turned up 6 times between indeed, workwise, stepstone and workwise since then like every quarter the cheaper option probably did not work out.
Skill means many years or decades of experience. The ones complaining are fresh graduates or fairly junior people, or skilled experienced once who got laid off in large corporates with 180k annual income who can’t find anything in the same range anymore.
It’s not about “different opinions”. On Reddit you see the side of workers not finding a job, while on the news you read about enterprises not finding workers. It’s happening both.
For IT it’s only certain niches.
No, Germany is not lacking skilled workers. Germany is lacking skilled workers that are willing to work for a salary of an unskilled worker and who also want to do the work of an entire team by themselves.
There’s a shortage of people willing to do work that is considered unattractive:
– Lots of late shifts or night shifts;
– Located in rural areas;
– Low salary (especially when combined with required certification);
– Stressful people jobs like nursing or being a kindergarden or elementary school teacher;
– Jobs where you have career alternatives with higher salaries on similar qualifications, like being a STEM teacher at school.
“shortage of workers” in Germany is always code for “We do not like the wages we have to pay people and would like more applicants, so we can lower wages.”
The IT shortage only relates to experienced specialists, people asking here would be juniors straight out of the university with limited German skills, nobody is looking for them here.
And now Europe made a deal with India for easy work access… Let’s see how this will impact our job pool😅
I generally assume this is just ragebait, no one in their right mind can possibly claim that there is a shortage of it workers in germany
yeah thats bullshit. It should read “Germany is facing massice shortage of skilled workers, from nurses to IT specialists, who have 10+ years of work experience and are willing to work for ~40k/year in cities like Munich/Berlin … “
Their is no worker shortage but a shortage of slaves.
Companys dont want to pay a living wage and germans dont want foreinger labour because it pushes down the wages. Good example are truckdrivers the salary went down so much compared to the cost of living its crazy.
Thats goes for most jobs where good german is not needed.
Germany is facing a massive shortage of CHEAP skilled workers.
The headlines don’t tell the fact that German companies are not willing to pay a fair wage.
Missing context here are – 1) missing “cheap” and “disposable” labour, i.e. legal slavery, 2) Job market and soceity here is not ready for integrating these skilled workers. Yes, integration is a two-way street. 3) C2 German insistance from day 0 does not help with 2). 4) Some skilled workforce is actually over-qualified for the current requirements..
I am sure there is more that we do not see or notice, but there are many reasons for this mismatch of experienced and reported reality. And over simplification of the issue does not help..
Germany has an abundance of skilled workers lacking the skills the market needs and at the same time struggles to attract talent from abroad with the skills and experience the economy needs. Hence unemployment rates are on the rise while the shortage of skilled workers remains.
There are areas where everyone says thefe are shkrtages. But, on Reddit often geniuses are complaining who expect 100k /year upwards as normal salary, with complete homeoffice as soon as they learned to tie their shoelaces.Everything else is only “cheap labor”.
E.g. people complain whose jobs are easily off- / near shored.
Reddit expectations do not meet reality. The shortage is in senior positions, who earn well and have no issues in finding new jobs..
A fresh graduate isn’t a skilled worker, not yet. And skilled workers – where? Metal? Construction? Chem industries? DW, in its generalization, rather harms than helps.
Let’s say you have a 200 people that are considered skilled carpenters for example. There are 125 jobs searching for carpenters and 75 jobs searching for nurses. In theory there’s a job for everyone but in reality carpenters can’t find work they’re qualified for while health care can’t find enough qualified nurses. There’s too much on one end and too little on the other. You want to make an apple pie but the store only has oranges left
the truth is, germany is lacking skilled workers that they can only pay 30k a year….
Because of Drama. They dont need “skilled” workers, they need “cheap” workers. And because no one wants to be exploited they take in people from poor countries that are willing to work for less. Thats the whole magic here.
They have the shortage, cause they dont want to pay the trained people what they are worth. Simple as that. With a Masters Degree i now look at the salary that Bachelors Degree wouldnt even look at 5 years ago.
German language is the most hurdle.
Germany is facing a shortage in certain areas. We have plenty of HR. What we don’t have? Nurses doctors and Handwerker. And all of those we proper language skills and the correct certifications.
That is hard to come by if a country makes having babies too expensive. So you outsource having kids into foreign countries.
That being said, getting this right is hard. Like really hard. Ive seen it in our hospitals and doctors offices. Everywhere you look, foreigners. If said foreigner doesn’t speak your complicated language well enough with a patient in need. That creates incredible friction and frustration on both sides.
Adding our incredible taxes. Yeah. Makes attracting good people hard. And I say. Please come. Most of us are nice.
Bc the news channels are lying. It’s that simple. No one wants to pay for skilled workers anymore.
They need huge amount of 20 somethings with two decades of high level work expertise, willing to work 60+ hours for €12 or less and ready to manage the company after management could not decide. It is of course understood that writing down said hours beyond 40 hours is not happening. In addition 24/7 phone availability is mandatory. 50 and above need not apply. Also foreign workers are not welcome. /s
Anecdotes are not the same as aggregate data, and there is a distinction between the macro and micro economy.
There are shortages in specific sectors in specific regions requiring specific skills at specific salary grades.
The people complaining on here do not fulfil at least one of those criteria, therefore end up either under-or unemployed. Labour is not perfectly substitutable. So where there is a glut of workers in one sector, that does not mean those workers can be deployed in another (if they even wanted to).
Two things can be true, Germany has an overall staff shortage, at the same time Germany has over-saturation of applicants in specific fields that do little to address the first point.
Because it is true. For instance nurses: You can be the best trained and skilled nurse from your country. But here in Germany you lack qualification from a bearocratic pov. So you have to do extra training and tests and are only allowed to work as a “stupid” nursing helper which can be really frustrating, when you know what to do.
Pretty much everyone is saying this, though? For nurses it’s pretty straight forward, for IT it highly depends on the specific field, because some are oversaturated already.
However, the economy demanding “more skilled workers” doesn’t necessarily mean there are too few, but that there isn’t “enough” competition from an employer point of view.
An experienced IT person will not work for minimum wage. He will also spot bullshit and will likely call it out.
Someone new to the field will not match their expectations.
Nurses are indeed a problem – badly treated, badly paid and now they’re surprised nobody wants to work in the field.
Completely homegrown problems.
We need more workers than we got now because of the many old people (Boomers) retiring soon.
Because german leaders hate you and Europe 😉
The main issue is communication like these. We lack skilled workers, but not in IT
The blue collar worker area faces most of the shortage. People are not even willing to come for small works now a days