Mareike Krönert is faced with a difficult decision: Does she want to start training as a housekeeper in a conference center in the fall, or as a retail clerk in a supermarket? The secondary school student has received commitments from both companies. The pandemic makes it even more difficult for her: “If the situation is the same in autumn as it is now? Perhaps then my training cannot take place properly,” she worries.
“Everyone in my class was a little in the air last year,” says the 16-year-old, who is in the tenth grade of the Arnstein secondary school. Application training and apprenticeship fairs were canceled, internships could only take place in rare cases. Mareike was lucky and was able to do an internship in the conference house, which now offers her an apprenticeship position, during the past autumn break. At that time the hostel was already closed for guests? Mareike got a very good impression of how her training could work in lockdown.
Lockdown delays application processes
An interview for the training was supposed to take place in January, but was postponed due to the pandemic. “They said I should report back to me after the lockdown and then the lockdown was extended over and over again,” she recalls.
Mareike is interested in working with food and also chose nutrition and health as a focus in secondary school. Contact with people is also important to her. So she got the idea to apply as a retail saleswoman, a crisis-proof job, as the corona pandemic has shown. Training in the supermarket would also have the advantage for her that she could stay at home and attend vocational school in Karlstadt.
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Fewer training contracts concluded in 2020
Like Mareike and her classmates, many high school students are currently “in the air”. According to surveys by portals such asbildung.de, more than half of the students surveyed are worried that, for example, there will be fewer apprenticeships due to the Corona crisis and they could go away empty-handed.
In fact, according to information from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 12.6 percent fewer training contracts were concluded in the Main-Spessart district in autumn 2020 than in the previous year. That has to do with Corona, knows Lukas Kagerbauer, division manager for vocational training at the IHK Würzburg Schweinfurt. “This is not because there are necessarily fewer jobs,” says Kargerbauer, “but because applicants and companies cannot find each other.” An enormous uncertainty can be felt among the applicants: How will the training company continue in the Corona crisis and how can training now take place? The students opted for a “safe” option and switched to the FOS / BOS instead of going to the “minefield training”, so Kagerbauer’s impression.
Crafts are looking for 165 trainees in MSP
These worries are unfounded, one now has to find ways to take the students’ uncertainty away. “At the moment we are missing job fairs, orientation at schools and internships,” said Kagerbauer. Online events are better than nothing, but they cannot replace personal contact.
On request, the Chamber of Crafts also states that applicants don’t have to worry: 1,600 apprenticeship positions are advertised throughout Lower Franconia, which is roughly the same as in previous years. There are 165 jobs in the skilled trades in the Main-Spessart district. Every trainee is a skilled worker for tomorrow, according to the managing director of the Ludwig Paul Chamber of Crafts. “And skilled workers are urgently needed in the trade.”
Career decision has not yet been made
Mareike is happy that she dealt with the subject of training at an early stage. In this way, she was still able to use all the opportunities for career orientation that existed before the pandemic: In 2019, at a holiday workshop for schoolchildren, she sniffed five different apprenticeships; did an internship in a pharmacy during the holidays and worked in a day care facility. An internship in kindergarten had to be canceled due to the first lockdown a year ago.
Mareike will soon have to make a decision, also so that she can then clear her head for the upcoming final exams. “I am already sorry for the company that I have to cancel. But I am also very happy that I was accepted twice.”
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