The number of skilled foreign workers in technical and scientific professions in Germany has increased significantly. According to the German Economic Institute in Cologne (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, IW), between 2012 and 2022, this figure rose by around 190 percent to approximately 202,000. Professions and study courses covering maths, IT, science and technology (the German equivalent of STEM) are referred to under the acronym MINT. According to the figures, the rise in employment in these areas was taken up to a greater degree by foreigners than for academic MINT professions in general, for which the growth rate was only around 48 percent. As a result, the share of foreigners in these professions has risen steadily from 6.5 percent to 12.7 percent over the past ten years. According to the study, the resulting additional 132,000 foreign employees in MINT professions have contributed around 16 billion euros per annum in added value to the German economy.
Recruiting has become difficult and complicated
Skilled foreign workers are very much in demand – and this demand will only increase in the coming years. A further study published by IW revealed that foreign workers are seen as an enrichment by the vast majority of businesses, but recruiting from outside the EU was particularly challenging for businesses due to the complicated legal processes and lengthy procedures involved. For this reason, only four out of ten businesses see recruiting skilled international workers as a way of finding skilled workers for their own companies. Small businesses, in particular, find this route a difficult one to go down. Larger businesses, on the other hand, have more experience with recruiting and employing skilled foreign workers and can, therefore, make better use of this group’s potential for meeting demand for skilled workers.
80.8 percent of businesses surveyed indicated that the complexity of the current legal regulations was the biggest hurdle to employing skilled foreign workers. Nearly 60 percent said that recognising foreign professional qualifications was a hurdle to employing skilled foreign workers. But this is likely to change in the near future. The Federal Government’s proposed changes to the Skilled Immigration Act will simplify and/or remove the obligation for foreign professional qualifications to be officially recognised. But businesses also see the long recruitment process, also when commissioning an agency, and the applicant selection process as a hurdle to employing skilled international workers.