It’s a gloomy prognosis, but a new study claims that by 2040 Germany could suffer from a major shortage of specialized skilled workers to fill important jobs. So far Berlin has not really taken notice. Deutche Welle reports.
A new study by the economic research institute Prognos paints a dire picture of Germany’s labor market in the foreseeable future. For 2030, the company calculated a shortage of about 3 million skilled workers in Germany. By 2040, they see the shortfall growing to about 3.3 million.
Even though the population of German is not expected to shrink as much and as quickly as recently feared, the number of people in working age will continue to fall sharply – by as much as 10 percent by the year 2040.
Perhaps a bit surprisingly the report says that skilled workers will become scarce across all sectors as the nation’s population ages and the number of those retiring continues to grow. Germany’s workforce currently stands at 44.2 million, the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis) said this month.