German Chancellor vows to battle skills crisis

The high-tech and telecoms industries should not take priority over traditional industries like manufacturing, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder told a conference in Berlin today.

Amid all the hype about the new e-economy, Schröder reminded delegates at SAP's Sapphire conference that only five percent of Germany's working population are employed in high technology and telecoms. Although that's set to grow, he said, the emphasis should be on transforming traditional industries through IT rather than simply nurturing dot-com start ups.

"It will be a long time before the new industries have the value-add and the job-creating capabilities of the traditional sectors," said Schröder. "In Germany we've always been world leaders in integrating new technology into conventional means of production."

Like the rest of the industrialised world, Germany is facing a shortage of skilled IT workers. Schröder laid much of the blame for this shortage on short-sighted hiring practices in the 1980s, which saw German companies import skilled workers while ignoring the educated German workforce. German young people responded by avoiding universities, he contended.

Schröder promised help from the German government in solving the problem. He reiterated his pledge to double the number of trainees taken on by German companies to 60,000 by 2003 and pledged to boost immigration quotas for skilled workers to solve the problem in the short term.