In the future, employees in Germany should be able to take a publicly funded training period for their further training. Federal Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) announced at the presentation of the national further training strategy on Tuesday in Berlin that a draft law would be presented by the end of the year. The instruments for promoting further vocational training should be completely reorganized with the planned law.

"We will introduce a new education period and part-time education," said Heil. "Employees can take their further training into their own hands and operate it independently," he explained. "In this way, you can achieve a career change or a better-paying job, for example if you want to move up to hotel management as a trained hotel clerk."

Further training should also be able to be promoted more by the Federal Employment Agency, similar to short-time work benefits. "We will create an instrument that we call qualification money," announced Heil. "It's about companies in which a larger part of the workforce is affected by transformation, especially in parts of mechanical engineering or also at newspaper publishers." The politician explained: "If the employees receive further training on a large scale, we want to enable support from the Federal Employment Agency with this new instrument of qualification money."

criticism from employers

It had previously become known that Germany's employers were critical of the coalition's plans to strengthen further training opportunities for employees in Germany. According to a position paper by the employers' association BDA, the "partial education time" agreed in the coalition agreement would unnecessarily complicate the already unclear legal situation in matters of further education.

The BDA criticizes: "There are already numerous opportunities for job market-related further training funding for different target groups and with different objectives." Instead of introducing new funding instruments, the existing ones should be brought into an overall structure. According to the employers' association, if the goal of increasing participation in further training is to be achieved with "part-time education", it must be financed from taxes and not from the contributors' funds.