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Germany is faced with the immense challenge of integrating thousands of refugees. The most successful path to integration is through the workplace. Refugees bring with them motivation, energy and commitment. Many of them are qualified professionals. Moreover, while fleeing from their home country, they gained a wide range of experiences useful for German employers. Refugees in Germany are eager to find a job and contribute actively to the society they live in. For refugees, employment is a new start in a new country and an opportunity to find home in Germany. For companies, employing refugees is an opportunity to fill open positions and invest in the future. Due to the demographic change and ageing society, many companies find it difficult to recruit the qualified professionals they need. The fact that the majority of refugees who come to us are under 35 years old enables companies to find and bind the employees they need.
German Bundestag passed the Integration Act on July 7. The guiding principle on which the new legislation is based is that of “support and challenge”. Refugees who have good prospects of being allowed to stay permanently will be eligible to take integration courses and to take advantage of job and training opportunities sooner than before. But they will also be required to work on their own integration. Those asylum seekers who refuse to take an integration course or who do not meet their duties to cooperate will have their benefits curtailed.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil and Colombia, three new counselling centres for the recognition of professional qualifications will be opened. In addition, the existing counselling services in Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Italy, Poland and Vietnam will be further expanded. Over the next four years, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research will fund the "ProRecognition" project with almost 8 million euros - twice as much as in the first funding phase.
More than 13,200 foreign professional qualifications were recognised in 2014, the Federal Statistic Office reports. This is a twelve percent increase over the previous year. Since the Recognition Act entered in force in April 2012, some 32,500 applications were granted full or limited recognition, which is good news in view of rising skills shortages.
The new Employment Ordinance has been in force since 1 July. The list of occupations in which people with vocational training qualifications from non-EU countries can access the German labour market is now also in place. Following the "EU Blue Card" for the highly skilled, the improved recognition of foreign vocational qualifications and the relaxations in the rules for students from non-EU countries who wish to stay on to work in Germany, this is a further important step towards making it easier for workers from outside the EU to enter the German labour market and towards covering the skills gap in the German economy via migration.
The 20,000th recognition notification of the IHK FOSA went to Mariana Raposo dos Santos in Karlsruhe. This confirmed the full equivalence of the chemical laboratory assistant's training completed in Portugal with the German qualification. The recognition notification makes her professional qualification as a skilled worker transparent and thus contributes to her integration into the German labour market.
Taking up a German initiative, the EU SME Envoys Network has drawn up the new European Action Programme for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The European SME Action Programme was presented in Brussels to Elżbieta Bieńkowska, the Commissioner responsible for the internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and SMEs.
The federal cabinet approved the fifth report on the Recognition Act. The report bundles the results of the recognition monitoring and, as in previous years, provides important information on the current development in the area of professional recognition - at the political level as well as in practice.
The Federal Statistical Office published the statistics on the Recognition Act this October. Over 17.000 applications for recognition of foreign professional qualifications were processed in 2015 in Germany. In most of the cases, full or partial equivalence could be established. Only 2.6% of the applicants received a negative ruling.