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Germany looks to India to meet chronic shortage of engineers
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 10 May 2008, 17:42 IST
London: Germany is recruiting more from overseas especially India to sustain growth and innovation as the country is suffering from a chronic shortage of skilled engineers, says a new industry study.
The German engineering firm Bosch recruited 1,500 engineers from India last year and nearly 1,000 from China as part of pursue its expansion plans in the emerging markets.
Germany had 70,000 unfilled engineering posts last year at a cost of 7 billion euros to the economy a year, according to a recent study by the German Engineering Federation (VDI).
Franz Fehrenbach, Bosch chief executive, believes that by early 2009, it would have more staff in China and India - 23,000 and 20,000 respectively - than in any other country apart from Germany.
"We are really facing a dramatic situation. This is the key problem of the future," Fehrenbach said.
The company's head for industrial relations Wolfgang Malchow said: "We need more engineers. It affects other west European countries and therefore the solution is to hire them from abroad but this can only be temporary."
Hans-Peter Klos, managing director of the Cologne-based German Economics Institute, which carried out the study, said there were now almost 100,000 vacancies.
German executives believe that the growing skills shortages in Europe are a bigger problem than the strength of the euro or the U.S.-led economic slowdown.
Fehrenbach said Bosch would be unable to sustain its hi-tech "clusters" in Germany without an adequate supply of engineers.