60% of German Companies Refuse to Train Youth With a Migration Background

A recent study by Bertelsmann Stiftung has raised some eyebrows, with the study claiming that close to 60% of German companies refuse to train youth with a migration background, while only 15% are currently training such youth.

The 74.8% of the companies claimed that they failed to take up youth with a migration background into their Ausbildung program mainly for lack of applicants from this demographic group. A fact the researchers that came up with the report highly disregarded. Currently every fourth applicant in Germany has a migration background. Furthermore, due to many other factors, this group of young people tend to send out more applications than a “typical” German applicant.

Another excuse they gave was the fear of a language barrier (38%) and also the fear of enormous cultural differences (14.7%) between the applicant and the other colleagues. Only 9.1% were afraid that the applicant had bad grades.

The report pointed out that locking out this integral part of the soceity from training was essentially hurting the German economy and would continue to do so, especially now due to the demographic changes Germany is currently facing.

41.1% of the 450,000 companies that offer Ausbildungen to the youth in Germany, have had experience with youth in their company that have a migration background. It was noted that for these companies, having migrants and youths with a migration background was a normal occurrence for them. It was also noted that these companies explicitly had an application process that made the heritage of the applicant irrelevant.