A Skilled Workforce: German IT Industry Does Not Have Enough of It

In the opinion of Bitkom – an association lobbying on behalf of the German IT industry – and its President Willi Berchtold, Germany’s immigration policy needs to be subjected to a rethinking process. As it is, the association states that the country already has too few engineers and other specialists in computer science, for example. Despite the high level of unemployment in Germany, a third of companies operating in the IT line of business have problems filling their vacancies with adequately skilled staff, according to Bitkom. “This need for qualified staff on the part of companies cannot be met in its entirety by turning to that pool of labour furnished by our own system of education,” Mr. Berchtold stated. By calling for “immigration with a greater focus on qualified people” Bitkom is picking up on warnings that have repeatedly been expressed during the last few months. At the end of last year, Jürgen Gallmann, CEO of Microsoft Deutschland, had already warned of a “serious shortage of IT specialists.”
Bitkom states that the Green Card regulation on work permits for foreign specialists that feature a time limit have a number of conspicuous drawbacks. It has failed to provide foreign top-level specialists with long-term perspectives in Germany, Bitkom’s president noted. The residents and work permits associated with the German Green Card come with a time limit of five years – provided the holder earns less than 85,000 euros annually. “Linking permanent resident status to a minimum income of this kind is tantamount in practice to enforcing a rule banning immigration,” Mr. Berchtold said. “All in all, we need to become more attractive as a place to live and work; we need to sell our image more efficiently to international elites,” Mr. Berchtold insisted.
Excerpted from: German IT Industry Association Sees Lack of Skilled Workers, workpermit.com, 18 July 2006