During the Corona crisis, comparatively few young people in Germany started dual training. For the past year, the Federal Statistical Office registered 466,200 new training contracts. That was 0.6 percent more than in the first Corona year 2020, but again around 9 percent less than in the pre-crisis year 2019, when more than 500,000 new training courses were started.
At the end of 2021, 1.26 million people were in dual vocational training, the Federal Office confirmed further preliminary figures on Tuesday. That was 3 percent less than a year earlier. The Corona crisis has exacerbated the long-term trend that fewer and fewer young people are choosing classic training in companies and vocational schools. Since 2011, the number of trainees has fallen by 14 percent, while the number of people of the typical training age between 15 and 24 years has only fallen by 6 percent.
Training courses in retail, in offices and in the automotive sector continue to be particularly popular. Shifts can be seen, among other things, in IT professions such as IT specialists with an increase of 5 percent or in e-commerce merchants (+26 percent). As at the beginning of the Corona crisis, few young people will start a cooking apprenticeship in 2021, but the number of trainees in system gastronomy will increase (+18 percent). There is little confidence among tourism merchants, where the number of new contracts fell by another 26 percent after the sharp 61 percent slump in 2020. (dpa)