The Federal Institutes for Vocational Education for Development the demand and supply of skilled workers in Germany analyze in its 2024 report the development of the availability of IT talent in Germany.

Here are a few key points as per summary and survey by bitkom:

• by 2024 around 30% of Germany’s IT workforce is retiring
• About 120,000 additional IT professionals will join the labor market until 2040
• At the same time the demand for IT professionals will grow with about 630,000

In the short summary bitkom gives a few points regarding planned actions and anticipations countering the trend:

• Introduce measures to keep older employees in the sector (about 68,500)
• Winning more young folks and woman for IT education (about 107,000)

With that bitkom analyst hopes that the gap can be at least cut by half. The other half is anticipated to be filled via immigration.

Unrealistic scenario

We evaluate the proposed solutions and the anticipated immigration as rather unrealistic.

Fixing education is highly unlikely, keeping older IT professionals in the job is a good idea, but looking at the progress of IT careers this is also unlikely to fix the gap for software developers and coders. Immigration is not going to help as only very few immigrants will speak German to an acceptable level and German companies tend not to be willing to establish English at least partly as corporate language.

The real solution – that will also solve the labor market shortage now and in the 15 years until 2040 – is building strategic cooperations with IT expert companies abroad. But even here German companies need to adapt and build a new type of IT-operations – flexible, capable and future proof.