VDMA
Ghana pilot project for mechanical and plant engineering
Together with a university network in Ghana, students with IT expertise are to be approached to work remotely for mechanical engineering companies in Germany.
The IT skills shortage in Germany continues to worsen. At the end of 2022, 73% of companies reported fundamental staff shortages, with almost 140,000 vacancies for IT staff in Germany unfilled. At the same time, companies' demand is growing in this area in particular, as many projects are pending due to the challenges of digitalization. "At the top of the wish list of more than two thirds of managers in mechanical engineering are IT architects, data scientists and cloud specialists," says Dr. Jörg Friedrich, Head of the VDMA's Education Department.
Against this backdrop, the VDMA's IT department is planning a pilot project to address IT specialists in Ghana. "There is a shortage of IT specialists in Germany and Europe, while there are many IT graduates in Africa. However, they often cannot find jobs on the local labor market. With our project, we want to bring both sides together," explains Christoph Herr, a consultant from the VDMA's IT department. "We will start this cooperation project in Ghana, because Ghana is democratically stable and acts as an important anchor of stability in West Africa."
Ghana's higher education landscape is in a phase of massive expansion. According to figures from June 2019, there are a total of 205 universities, colleges, polytechnics and other institutes recognized by the National Accreditation Board - a more than 30-fold increase in 20 years. The situation is similar with Ghana's student numbers: Here, there has been an increase from over 20,000 to almost 420,000 between 1994 and 2016.
The program is to be implemented with Ghanaian universities that identify students within their student body, but also among their alumni, who can work as IT experts for German companies. These are to work remotely from Ghana. In order to make the skills and profiles between Ghana and Germany comparable and to achieve a high quality of matching, a commission will be set up consisting of half German and half Ghanaian experts.
Cooperation with universities to find IT experts and employ them locally for companies from abroad does not yet exist in this form.
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