Germany to court Indian IT talent – starting with easier visa application processes German chancellor Olaf Scholz has expressed his country's intention to import more qualified IT workers from India. "India has so much talent to offer and we want to benefit from that cooperation here in India but also with an eye to recruiting and attracting those talents to Germany and employing them there in our industry …
It still has very good universities producing skilled engineers. But there's need for many tens of thousands of engineers in the various industries in Europe and the current crops from all universities put together probably sums up to not even ten thousand engineers. Most universities produce maybe 100 engineers a year for things like mechanical engineering or IT related topics. There simply aren't enough people over here interested in the field.
No, just the amount of people going to university for tech/beta fields isn't enough to satiate the need for the majority of tech jobs (including chemical, electrical, mechanical engineering). That's before any of them decide to have a job in the industry or not. Just west of the border (Netherlands) there's still a lot of demand for IT jobs at very decent pay too, but not enough locals to fulfill those functions.
If you have one of the skill profiles requested by the German industry and are willing to work for not much more than a minimum salary and speak English there is no need to learn German.
I am not based in Germany but work for the German industry. I am fluent in German but a lot of meetings with people based in Germany are done in English as >15% of my co-workers do not speak German (well enough).
As far as i know none of the non German speaking co-workers is from India though.
@Ken G
Very true.
Anybody can learn a second language and English and German are both Germanic languages.
However the thing is that the Germans get along in English quite well. I worked in Germany in IT and used mainly English but I did improve my rubbish school German (my second foreign language in school) as it's good for your off work life, and why not.
Having people from India working in IT in Europe is of course nothing new, and is true in many European countries.
When I lived in Germany, they'd tell me, "German is a very difficult language. Just because you can speak English doesn't mean you can learn German so easily. There's only one You in English. There are two forms of you in German, Sie and Du."
I'd tell them, I come from India, in Hindi, there are three forms of you, namely Aap ("Sie"), Tum and Tu ("Du"), in some parts of India, mother calls child "Aap" and in other parts of India, everybody calls everybody else Tu, so don't worry about me. That'd stop all hints that I couldn't pick up German.
I wish you were right, but I've been trying to learn German on and off for years and I'm still bloody useless at it. Perhaps you could change it to "Anyone who can speak English can easily learn German unless they are bad with languages in general, went through the English school system when grammar was regarded as an instrument of the Devil, and are constantly bewildered by German's rich case system, gender structure and word-ordering".
I considered myself bad with languages until I was dropped in a job in Germany for a few years without the expected support. My German clients all spoke excellent English but that still left me tongue-tied at lunch and in the evenings until I picked some up. A similar experience in Brussels before that taught me more than 6 years of French in school. I don't speak either well but I can generally understand what people say to me and get out a response, though if it's important/work related I will speak in English and listen in the other language.
A former German Federal Minister for Technology once campaigned with the slogan “Kinder statt Inder” (Children instead of Indians). suggesting Germans needed to have more children in order to have more IT workers, not import Indian workers. That was in the year 2000 and he was from Angela Merkel’s CDU party
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