Recruitment of Skilled Employees and Workforce Development in Germany : Practices, Challenges, and Strategies for the Future

This chapter focuses on workforce development in the German context. Two issues are relevant: the fi rst one deals with the links between the standard form of initial VET, that is, the dual apprenticeship system, and formalised further training, which in its various facets has a major function in the German context when it comes to career building, but also to establishing a craft business. Second, companies in Germany, as in other countries, use internal schemes of personnel development and further training to maintain their workforces both in quantitative and qualitative terms. A crucial challenge currently seems to be demographic change, and the way companies try to cope with his challenge has led to new forms of incompany personnel development that were unknown in the past. Both aspects are discussed in this chapter