The shortage of certain job profiles It is not just an evil that Spanish companies complain about. Concern over the shortage of workers – skilled and unskilled – among German corporations based in Spain has doubled in recent months and is now their second biggest headache. This is reflected in the report by the German Chamber of Commercepresented this Thursday in Barcelona and that also records the general optimism among German companies, which plan to increase their investments and hire more people.
The business climate has improved substantially in recent months. Entrepreneurs have gone from taking a recession in Germany during 2023 -scenario contemplated by the chancellery of Olaf Schölz– that could drag half of Europe to focus on competing to attract the employees they need.
German managers say they lack profiles of all kinds in a country with 3.1 million unemployed: truckers, drivers, welders, mechatronics or computer engineers, among others. According to data published this Thursday, concern about the shortage of skilled labor has doubled between autumn and the current spring. This issue has gone from worrying 25% of German companies based in Spain to 49% in just a few months.
Until recently, many of these companies tried to capture profiles and then convince them to go to Germany. Today they are fighting to fill the vacancies of their affiliates here. In Spain there are some 1,400 companies With a German parent company, they have an annual turnover of around 75,000 million euros and employ around 218,000 people. Examples of this are supermarkets like Lidl, pharmaceuticals like Bayern or IT like T-Systems.
While concern about the availability of labor grows, issues such as energy or raw materials (such as microchips), which until recently seemed like they were going to sink the economic balance sheets of more than one corporation -German or not-, have dropped remarkably. Last autumn, the shortage of products represented the first concern of German companies in Spain, appearing in the ‘top’ 1 of fears of 73% of these companies. Today that fear has fallen to 41% and it is more worrying that the market maintains sufficient demand to buy the goods and services they produce.
German businessmen have also ‘normalized’ the price of energy. This issue has gone from worrying 64% of the companies interviewed by the Chamber to 36%.
Good EXPECTATIVES
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The fears of previous months have faded, also among the Germans, and the possible derivatives of the war in Ukraine they have not been as catastrophic for Western economies as feared at the time. The percentage of German corporations that qualify as “bad“Their situation has halved in recent months and corresponds to 4.1% of those surveyed.
The rest see the current situation as “good” either “satisfactory“. 86.3% of the companies interviewed affirm that they will increase or maintain their investments in Spain and almost half (46.6%) will increase their staff, compared to 9.6% who admit that they will cut them.