The Training Story

This week, the topic of high unemployment among new immigrants in Germany came up in the state-run news.....roughly 150,000 of the new folks who are approved for a visa but haven't found work.

There are various reasons given for this....but they mostly lead down to two central items....lack of language ability and no real background (skill or certificate).

So the suggestion which came from the clever intellectual folks in Berlin....was this idea of getting companies (not the Mom-and-Pop twenty-man shops),  to bring in a large untrained and but mostly limited German-speakers, and train them in their native language to the German craft or skill required.

I sat and pondered upon this.

What you'd be talking about is perhaps a 500-man company where you have three to six trainers hired and they typically take two or three apprentices each and "walk" them through the training steps to get their apprentice skill craft.

In this case.....three Iraqis would be hired and trained in their native language.  Naturally, the next question would be....trained by who?  What Germans do you have that speak Iraqi or Arabic?  Across all of Germany, in terms of certified trainers....I doubt if you can find more than a hundred folks who speak some level of Arabic.

The thing is....even if you had this trainer who spoke Arabic and spent two years getting these three guys trained and certified.....by the end, they really need to speak German to a proficient level.....to fit into a permanent position.

This is one of the harsh realities about so many coming in and some Berlin idiots who kept blabbing "we can do it" over and over.....but never thinking of the way that German culture and commerce are structured.  Even with this suggestion....the clever intellectual crowd continue to show their limited grasp of industry in Germany and the training atmosphere.

What will happen?  I suspect in the end that industry will mandate that the government (either local or state) need to step up to the plate and ensure everyone gets German language on a fast pace.  Fast-pace....sadly....will mean an entire year.

So you stand back and look at this.....150,000 folks who came in search of a new life, unemployed, and it could be a year, or two, or three....before anything really happens in their life.