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At the moment, a lot of refugees fleeing from war and persecution are desperate to get to Germany. On the one hand, it is a great challenge. On the other hand, it is a great opportunity: Germany can offer the refugees a safe haven and at the same time enable them to get qualified and enter the labor market.
The Statement of Comparability has been converted to a digital process. All application, processing and issuing procedures will be from now on digital.
Following the revised EU Professional Qualifications Directive of 2013, the federal government made the application procedures for the assessment of foreign professional qualifications even simpler.
As of January 18, 2016, the Recognition Act was revised: from now on, the citizens of the European Union or European Economic Area can submit their application and all relevant documents online. Furthermore, their applications will be processed by a single contact point. This application procedure will apply, at first, only to the regulated professions in the federal responsibility.
The German companies benefit from increase in recognition of foreign professional qualifications. The Federal Statistical Office reports a 20% increase over the previous year. This is a particularly important signal in times of skills shortages.
In order to advise and accompany foreign experts on their way to Germany, there are numerous institutions and structures in Germany and abroad that offer support.
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.
The Federal Ministry of Education launched the project “Prototyping Transfer – Professional Recognition through a Qualification Analysis” that is aimed to decrease the organizational cost of the qualification analyses, assure their quality and provide the applicants the financial assistance.
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 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.