Recognising foreign-earned professional qualifications

Harnessing the domestic workforce's unused skills, increasing the transparency of qualifications obtained abroad

Germany's economic upswing is paired with a major challenge: ensuring an adequate supply of skilled workers to sustain long-term economic growth. In the coming years, this will be one of the top tasks for the private sector and government alike.

To this end, in August 2010 Federal Minister Rainer Brüderle launched a skilled labour campaign in cooperation with German industry. Working together, government and industry aim to take the necessary measures to secure and strengthen the supply of skilled workers and specialists in Germany.

One central priority in these efforts is to better harness the available potential of the domestic workforce. There are unused reserves of skills and expertise in Germany which must be tapped in order to maintain and reinforce Germany's position as a world economic leader and an attractive place to do business. In particular, this unused potential includes people with immigrant backgrounds.

In 2008, Germany counted 15.6 million people with immigrant backgrounds - this is 19% of our country's total population. Of these, over 6 million hold vocational qualifications from their home countries that they are often unable to put into professional practice here in Germany. Due to technical reasons or the lack of procedures for assessing their acquired skills, many of these individuals work at jobs that do not match their actual qualifications.

In the words of Minister Brüderle: "We want to - and we must - integrate these professionally qualified individuals into Germany's labour market and society, both comprehensively and on a long-term basis. But to do this we have to take the appropriate steps to increase the transparency of this untapped potential."

There is far-reaching political consensus that Germany needs to improve its procedures for recognising and assessing the vocational qualifications that people living in Germany have obtained abroad. Staff members in Germany's chambers of commerce and other organisations are already providing valuable support in the form of expert opinions and advice. The Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology plans to assist these organisations by creating an online information service.

The Economics Ministry recognised very early the need to support the responsible authorities in their efforts to assess professional qualifications obtained abroad - well before legislators took up their work to establish a legal right to an assessment or recognition procedure.

Minister Brüderle emphasised the Ministry's forward-looking approach last year: "Pending legislation granting people the legal right an assessment procedure makes it all the more urgent for us to take steps to support the decision-makers in their work. For a start, we've launched the Economics Ministry's first concrete measure within the framework of our skilled labour initiative: to facilitate the assessment of foreign professional qualifications, we're setting up on online information service as part of our vocational education outreach. Thanks to this service, all decision-makers will have access to the same information."

As a first step, a feasibility study was conducted regarding the concept and necessary preconditions for such an online information service. At the same time, the Ministry commissioned a nation-wide survey of companies to identify what the private sector needs and requires with regard to certifications of professional qualifications obtained in other countries. One of the survey's aims was to increase the private sector's acceptance of such certifications and to boost companies' willingness to hire people with immigrant backgrounds.

This preliminary work is now being followed up by a three-year pilot project to build the online information service. The information service is a complementary measure to planned legislation that will regulate the procedures for assessing and recognising vocational qualifications earned abroad. The service's main purposes are (i) to assist Germany's chambers of commerce in the often-difficult process of assessing such qualifications and (ii) to make this process more uniform, speedy and transparent.

The information service will fulfil a variety of purposes, including:

1. assisting Germany's chambers of commerce in the process of assessing professional qualifications earned in other countries;
   
   
2. making assessment procedures more uniform, speedy and transparent;
   
   
3. boosting the acceptance of foreign-earned qualifications by making the content of these qualifications more transparent;
   
   
4. supporting the process of integrating people with immigrant backgrounds into Germany's labour market and society; and
   
   
5. completing a necessary step toward planned legislation that grants a legal right to an assessment and recognition procedure.

Increasing the transparency and acceptance of foreign-earned professional qualifications will help Germany to better tap the potential of its domestic workforce and thereby to secure the supply of skilled workers it needs for its long-term economic success.