LABOUR DEMAND IN GERMANY BY INDUSTRIAL SECTOR, OCCUPATIONAL FIELD AND QUALIFICATION UNTIL 2025 – MODEL CALCULATIONS USING THE IAB/INFORGE MODEL

Abstract

By means of a trend extrapolation of microcensus structures (undertaken by the German Federal Statistical Office) for the time period 1996–2007, the projections for labour demand by industrial sector which the IAB already has at its disposal can be transferred to demand by occupational field and subsequently by qualification level until 2025. The findings which have been claimed for some time now are upheld: production-related occupations will lose in significance, while further increases in employment particularly in occupations in the service sector are to be expected. Accordingly, the demand for personnel with a degree from a university or a university of applied sciences will go on rising, while the labour market opportunities for unskilled workers will continue to fall. However, vocational training or its academic counterparts still remain the dominant form of training in Germany. A continuing employment trend is to be expected here.

Keywords:

• Projection
• Labour demand
• Occupational field
• Qualification level
• Modelling

Notes

¹The notational convention in input–output analysis is followed: bold lowercase letters are vectors and bold uppercase letters are matrices. The subscript t indicates time.

²See www.euklems.net and O'Mahony and Timmer (2009).

³Due to data restrictions, time trends instead of a multinomial logistic approach are considered to yield the most robust results in estimating occupational trends within industries (see Cedefop, 2009).

⁴Other adjustment functions were tested, such as an exponential function, a reciprocal quadratic function and a Gompertz function. The results were very similar.

⁵We label service occupations that are at the end of an extended manufacturing process as primary service occupations, whereas secondary service occupations are characterized by a high share of knowledge-intensive work, which stands more or less on its own. Typically, primary service occupations are dominated by a medium-skilled labour force, secondary service occupations by a high-skilled labour force.