Across all industries
Study: Skills shortage is getting worse
02/05/2022 12:21 p.m
The search for qualified workers is becoming increasingly difficult. Whether IT or geriatric care – there are vacancies in more and more areas and no suitably trained unemployed. According to a study, around half a million jobs cannot be filled.
The shortage of skilled workers in Germany increased significantly again last year. The so-called skilled worker gap more than doubled over the course of the year, reported the competence center for securing skilled workers (Kofa) of the employer-related Institute of German Economics (IW) in the annual review 2021. The number of vacancies for which there were no suitably qualified unemployed persons nationwide increased accordingly from around 213,000 in January to a good 465,000 in December.
According to the study, the growing shortage of skilled workers is affecting the entire labor market. However, the bottlenecks are particularly pronounced in construction planning and supervision, in IT, in geriatric care and in physiotherapy. In purely mathematical terms, on average more than eight out of ten vacancies could not be filled with suitably qualified unemployed people in 2021.
According to the study, the gap in skilled workers in relation to the vacancies was generally greatest in the “health, social affairs, teaching and education” occupational field, closely followed by the “construction, architecture, surveying and building technology” field. The shortage of skilled workers has recently become particularly acute in the fields of “natural sciences, geography and IT” and “transport, logistics, protection and security”.
According to Kofa, the occupational field “linguistics, literature, humanities, social sciences and economics, media, art, culture and design” recorded the smallest bottlenecks and also the smallest growth over the course of the year.