The figure “Germany needs 400,000 skilled workers a year” circulates constantly, usually with no source and, more importantly, with the wrong meaning attached. The number is real. What it actually measures is not.
Where the number actually comes from
The 400,000 figure comes from IAB — the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Germany’s own federal Institute for Employment Research. IAB’s research is direct: without any immigration, Germany’s working-age population (what it calls the Erwerbspersonenpotenzial) shrinks by 7.2 million people by 2035, and by 16 million in total by 2060, purely from demographic ageing. IAB’s own conclusion is stated plainly: only with annual net immigration of 400,000 people does the working-age population stay at its current level over the long term.
What the figure is not
This is a total net migration figure — everyone who moves to Germany net of everyone who leaves, across every skill level, every industry, every route: skilled workers, family members, students, refugees, EU citizens moving freely, and vocational trainees all counted together. It is not a count of Ausbildung places Germany is trying to fill, and it is not exclusively about “skilled workers” in the sense of trained professionals. Presenting it as a specific Ausbildung recruitment target overstates what the research actually says.
It’s also worth being upfront that other credible German research bodies model this differently. The Bertelsmann Stiftung, a separate and well-regarded research foundation, has published lower figures for the specific slice of labour migration needed — estimates in past studies have ranged from roughly 98,000 to nearer 290,000 a year depending on the time period and methodology used. The 400,000 IAB figure and these other estimates are not measuring exactly the same thing, which is a large part of why the numbers you see quoted online don’t agree with each other.
What this genuinely means for Ausbildung applicants
Strip away the misquoted headline number and the underlying fact still holds: Germany’s own labour market research says its workforce is shrinking for demographic reasons that immigration is the primary lever to offset, and vocational training is one of the main paths policymakers have built for that — including, specifically, routes designed for people outside the EU. That is the real basis for Germany actively running visa categories like §16a of the Aufenthaltsgesetz for vocational trainees, rather than restricting training places to German and EU nationals. It is a genuine structural opening, not a marketing line — it just isn’t literally “400,000 Ausbildung seats a year,” which is not what the research measured.
See where the actual demand sits
The shortage data broken down by trade — which is more directly useful than the migration headline figure — is in our piece on which Ausbildung trades are actually in shortage, and by sector on our programmes page.
Where this comes from: the 400,000 figure and the demographic projections behind it are from IAB — Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Germany’s federal labour market research institute. The alternative estimates are from the Bertelsmann Stiftung.
