Courage
to address the gap

What are partial qualifications?

Partial qualifications are generally five to six parts of a complete professional profile that can be individually reviewed, learned, and utilized on the labor market. Overall, they reflect all of the knowledge and skills needed for a specific job.

What are the advantages of partial qualifications?

Job seekers who have completed partial qualifications have significantly better opportunities. Such qualifications are almost as valuable for re-integrating in the workforce as complete retraining, which usually takes at least two years instead of just two to six months. Companies can fill open positions better and more quickly in a tight labor market if they explicitly advertise the partial qualifications they currently need. For assistants, this is on average 1 – 2 partial qualifications, for specialists 3 – 4 partial qualifications per position.

Are companies ready to take the plunge?

Many companies are more flexible when it comes to requirements for new employees due to the current situation on the labor market, as long as they have core competencies. Partial qualifications are a useful tool in this scenario to foster transparency on both sides: requirements in the job advertisement and competencies in the application. We know this is the case, for instance, because over 80 percent of HR managers in a large-scale corporate survey say they would be willing to hire people without a professional degree who have only partial qualifications.

At the same time, we can already use artificial intelligence today to extract information on the demand for partial qualifications from job advertisements. This means that, in principle, companies are looking for partial qualifications – they just don't call a specific set of competencies a partial qualification.

What needs to change in staff selection?

The issue of qualification needs to be part of the equation right from the start. Companies don’t just need to ask: “Who do I have sitting in front of me?” but rather: “What can I develop this person to be?” Then, they need to plan a qualification path from the outset. This is particularly important for people who haven’t completed a professional degree in their initial education. This kind of continuing education path should always start with a comprehensive skills assessment. In Germany, we place far too much emphasis on how someone learned something – whether in formal training or informally at the workplace – and not enough on what competencies the person has gained.

Do recruiting employees need new expertise?

In the future, assessing competencies based on strengths and resources will need to play a bigger role than it has in the past. Both the competencies of applicants and the competencies of existing workers need to be systematically assessed and developed. This is the only way companies can appropriately meet the challenges posed by multiple structural transformations.

What role will professional training play in the future?

Classic professional training will continue to play a key role in post-educational training, in addition to academic education. In the future, high trainee loyalty to companies and, conversely, the high flexibility of fully qualified workers and clear transparency about expected competencies will remain powerful across national boundaries. However, we also need a second training system for people older than 25 who have not completed a professional or academic training program. We need a more flexible approach for these individuals. Ideally, this should consist of easy-to-understand steps with clear, repeated successful experiences and the opportunity to complete phases of well-paid employment between training steps. This kind of second training system for adults should be built on partial qualifications.

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