By Jane Sonnenschein · April 21, 2026

I was talking with a friend today, and the longer we spoke, the more I felt that there is something deeply contradictory about Germany’s job market right now.

He told me about his current job at E.ON. He works in customer service, thirty hours a week, with the option to work from home 80 percent of the time. His main tasks are answering phone calls and emails, dealing with customer enquiries and complaints, and responding to questions about products and prices.

The basic salary is not especially high, but there is a sales commission. If he manages to sell a customer an additional product, he earns a little extra.

What struck me most was something he mentioned almost in passing: if an employee recommends someone who is successfully hired, and that person completes the training period, the company pays a referral bonus of €1,000.

One thousand euros, not one hundred.

What does that tell us?

It tells us that the company genuinely needs people.

If it did not, why would it pay such a large bonus to encourage employees to recruit others?

And yet that is exactly where the contradiction begins.

For the past two years, Germany has constantly been talking about pressure on the labour market and relatively high unemployment. The news is full of reports about the weakening economy, companies cutting jobs and finding work becoming increasingly difficult.

So why are so many people looking for jobs and sending out applications that disappear without a reply, while companies are apparently so short of staff that they are willing to pay substantial referral bonuses?

The more I think about it, the more I feel that what Germany often lacks today is not simply “people.” What it lacks are people who have followed the approved qualification path.

Many positions appear to be open to applicants, but what employers are really looking for is someone with the right kind of Ausbildung—a formal German vocational qualification—someone with the relevant certificates and a sufficiently “proper” professional history.

But are many of these jobs really so complicated that they require such a rigid path?

Honestly, not always.

Take the customer service job my friend described. Of course, it is not a job that anyone can do without preparation. You need to communicate well. Your German cannot be too weak. You have to understand the customer’s problem and explain things clearly over the phone. When someone makes a complaint, you also need to remain calm.

But if a company were genuinely willing to train someone properly for a month, six weeks or perhaps two months, many people could learn the job relatively quickly.

And that is the problem.

Many German companies complain that they cannot find workers, while also refusing to bear the cost of training them.

What they really want is the most convenient kind of employee: someone who can begin immediately, who has ideally already been trained by somebody else and who arrives carrying a certificate proving that they are “qualified.”

But if every company only wants people who are already fully trained, where is experience supposed to come from?

How is anyone supposed to develop real ability?

That is the most frustrating contradiction in Germany’s job market today. Everyone says there is a labour shortage, but relatively few companies are willing to take in someone who has potential but does not yet have the right piece of paper, and then help that person grow into the role.

What makes it even more paradoxical is that the training path leading to that certificate may not be particularly effective either.

My friend had previously enrolled in a vocational training program because he wanted to enter a particular industry. The Ausbildung had originally lasted three years but was later shortened to two.

That sounds fairly efficient, doesn’t it?

But once he actually began, the reality was very different.

For the first year and a half, almost everything was theoretical. He went to the training centre every day and worked his way through the scheduled courses.

The problem was that much of the material was already outdated and badly disconnected from real working life. It was an IT-related training centre, which should have placed it close to the latest technological developments. Yet some of the computers looked as though they had been left behind by the previous century.

The whole thing felt absurd. This was supposed to be a place preparing people for future careers, but the first impression it gave was one of being behind the times.

It was not as though my friend had chosen the first institution he found. Before enrolling, he visited several training providers. The one he eventually selected was supposed to be one of the better options. It was a large and well-known chain in Germany, and its reputation within the industry was not bad.

But once he was inside, he realised that the equipment was not the only problem.

Teachers were often absent.

Even when they came, there was little continuity.

Teachers were replaced frequently.

Some were so poorly qualified that he began to wonder where the institution had found them and whether they had much professional knowledge themselves.

He said there were good teachers too. Occasionally, someone would begin teaching and you could immediately feel the difference: this person actually knew what they were doing.

But such teachers were rare.

More often, the lessons did not leave you with a clearer understanding. Sometimes you were even more confused afterwards.

That creates a particularly discouraging situation.

The system tells you that you must follow this training path, yet the path itself may not be worth the enormous amount of time it demands.

The more ironic part came later.

The two-year course also required a six-month internship with a company. On paper, that sounds perfectly reasonable. After learning the theory, you enter a real workplace and gain practical experience. The structure appears complete.

But in reality, even finding an internship was difficult.

Once you finally found one, another problem appeared. The company could take on an unpaid intern, but the employees who were supposed to supervise that intern were often already overwhelmed with their own work.

They had to finish their daily tasks while also looking after someone new. From their point of view, it often did not feel like “training a future employee.” It felt like an additional burden.

So what happened?

On paper, you were doing an internship. In reality, nobody truly taught you anything.

When you had a question, you were told to search for the answer on Google.

When you needed some cooperation or resources from the company to complete your internship report, people delayed, avoided the issue or made the process unnecessarily difficult.

You believed you were following a formal and complete route into a profession. But often, it felt more as though you had simply been placed inside a process and left to figure everything out alone—to struggle alone, make mistakes alone and slowly wear yourself down.

That is when the entire system begins to look particularly absurd.

You cannot enter the profession because you do not have the certificate.

Fine. You spend two years earning it.

But during those two years, much of the theory taught in the first eighteen months may already be outdated, while the final six-month internship may offer almost no real guidance.

To put it plainly, this is not entirely about “training people.” To some extent, it is about completing the formal requirements of a system while also absorbing a certain amount of free labour along the way.

That is what I find so damaging about the system Germany has today.

The problem is no longer simply that the barrier to entry is high. The barrier is high, the process is long and the cost is considerable—yet at the end of it all, the system may still fail to develop someone into a capable worker.

From the outside, of course, it all looks very proper.

There is training.

There is an internship.

There is an institution.

There is a certificate.

There is a complete pathway.

It looks more stable and rigorous than the systems found in many other places.

But when you see how it works in reality, you realise that enormous amounts of time and energy are being spent on the pathway itself rather than on the actual growth of a person’s abilities.

What is even more frustrating is that the people most likely to be trapped by this system are not necessarily people with no ability at all.

My friend had always been interested in computer hardware and already had some practical skills. If he had not lacked the right certificate, he could easily have tried to enter the field when he was younger.

He has said that in a different environment, he would even have been willing to work without pay for several weeks or months. If the company then saw that he was capable, it could decide whether to keep him.

But in Germany, that logic often does not work.

Without the certificate and without the recognised pathway behind you, many doors will not even open far enough for you to try.

That is the most painful part.

It is not that you are incapable of learning.

It is not that you could never do the work.

You simply do not have the ticket that allows you to begin learning the job in the first place.

And even more strangely, in order to obtain that ticket, you first have to go through a training process that may be inefficient and, at times, feel as though it is running without actually moving forward.

That is why I increasingly feel that Germany’s current problem cannot be explained with the single words “labour shortage” or “unemployment.”

The real problem is this: companies complain that they cannot find workers, while large numbers of people remain locked outside. Between them stands an entire system that still depends heavily on certificates, formal qualifications and officially recognised career paths.

Of course, this system is not completely unreasonable.

Some industries do need strict rules. Some jobs should not allow people to begin without proper preparation.

The problem is that the same logic is too easily applied to almost every kind of work: first prove that you are qualified, and only then will you be given an opportunity.

But in reality, many jobs may not require such a long, rigid and outdated training path.

For many kinds of work, if a company were genuinely willing to teach someone, that person could learn by doing in a real working environment and become capable relatively quickly.

What is missing is precisely that willingness—and the patience to train someone.

The result is the deeply contradictory situation we see today.

Companies say they cannot find people.

The government struggles with unemployment.

Training institutions continue to open one course after another.

Interns are left to find their own way inside companies.

And what is truly being wasted is time, opportunity and people’s ability to grow.

Sometimes I feel that what Germany lacks today is not only labour. It also lacks a new way of thinking.

Not every job should be governed by the same logic of certificates.

Not every skill should require someone to sit in a classroom for two or three years before being allowed into the real world.

The world is changing too quickly. Knowledge itself is becoming outdated, and many of the things that matter most in a job are increasingly learned while doing the work. Skills grow from solving real problems. They are developed under the pressure of actual practice.

Yet many German institutions still hold on to an old-fashioned idea of security: first build an extremely complete pathway, then send people down it one by one.

But a more complete pathway does not necessarily produce better results.

A higher barrier does not necessarily mean more effective training.

Sometimes it simply means spending more time taking a very long route, only to discover at the end that you have not learned as much as you expected.

And the people who originally had ability and were willing to learn may already have been worn down and lost somewhere along the way.

This may be the most paradoxical reality of Germany’s job market today: there are jobs, and there are people, but between them stands a system with high barriers, a slow pace and a strong attachment to formal qualifications—a system that is not necessarily efficient.

And while that system creates constant anxiety about a “shortage of workers,” it is also keeping outside many of the people who might have grown into exactly the workers Germany needs.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 德国明明一直喊缺人，为什么那么多人还是找不到工作？

German version: Deutschland klagt ständig über Personalmangel – warum finden trotzdem so viele Menschen keine Arbeit?