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The German Employment Act defines which training and professional qualifications are necessary for non-EU citizens to take up employment in Germany. The German government has now amended this law, and the new version is scheduled to come into effect on 1 July, marking an important step towards an even more welcoming culture in Germany.

In recognition of its brilliant public achievements, the BQ-Portal gets into the final for the European Public Sector Award. The European Public Sector Award (EPSA) was launched to identify particularly innovative and successful projects. This award is aimed to encourage administrative agencies throughout Europe to learn from the best practices of others and to modernize their structures.

More and more people worldwide learn German. This positive trend becomes especially apparent in China (117,000 learners), in India (154,000 learners) and in Brazil (134,000 learners). Thereby, the number of German learners in China has even more than doubled within a period of five years.

The applicants willing to have their foreign credentials recognised must bear the costs of the recognition procedure. They must meet the costs for an application, translations, certified copies, and if necessary for a qualification analysis, as well as an additional training.

Our country profiles have been updated and are now available. Check out our new country profiles on Ghana and Uzbekistan. The profiles on 18 focus countries with high potential for recruiting skilled workers include information on the economy and society in these countries, on the most important features of the vocational training systems and on current immigration and integration in Germany.

Refugees are increasingly succeeding in integrating into the German labour market. Particularly female refugees benefit from improved recognition and training opportunities for their qualifications in the teaching and health care sectors.

The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) has evaluated the recognition of foreign professional qualifications in 2020. Overall, 5% more foreign vocational qualifications were recognised as fully or partially equivalent in 2020 than in the previous year.

Immigrants perform worse in the labor market than natives, likely because of the low transferability of home-country professional certificates. The standardized recognition of professional certificates in the host country represents one policy for increasing their transferability.This paper investigates the effects of a large recognition reform in Germany on the labor market outcomes of non-EU immigrants.