BERLIN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- Germany's internationally-renowned vocational colleges are confronted with a massive shortage of qualified teaching staff, a study published on Monday by the Bertelsmann Foundation warns.
According to the study, German vocational colleges need to attract around 60,000 new teachers until 2030. Roughly half of the current total of 125,000 educational professionals in the sector are expected to retire by that date, creating a large vacancies gap which cannot be filled by the jobs-training institutes at their regular staff replacement rate.
Study author Klaus Klemm noted that vocation colleges were already among the schooling centers that suffer the most from a widely-publicized shortage of teachers in Germany. The sector relied to a significant degree on lateral entrants which usually had university degrees but were otherwise not formally qualified to teach their subjects.
Commenting on the findings, Joerg Draeger, the president of the Bertelsmann Foundation, described the findings as alarming. "This deprives youth of important educational opportunities and harms the economy," Draeger said.
The Bertelsmann president called on the government to develop a nation-wide strategy to improve teacher levels before the situation deteriorated further. Training an individual to become a vocational college educator usually takes more than seven years in Germany.
Draeger's public appeal comes shortly after a regular survey by the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB) found that the satisfaction of apprentices with the vocational training system has fallen to a historical low in 2018. The German "dual education system", comprising distinct university and jobs training routes, is frequently cited as a key reason for relatively low youth unemployment in the Eurozone's largest economy.
Official estimates put the number of young Germans who attend courses at vocational colleges to gain a range of professional skills at 2.5 million. Given currently high demand for skilled labor from employers, the state-owned KfW banking group predicts that the total number of apprentices in the country is likely to grow again by roughly one percent in 2018.
