In its Fachkräfteengpassanalyse (skilled labour shortage analysis) for the reporting year 2025, the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) counts 157 shortage occupations — the second annual decline in a row. That sounds like relief. It is not. Reading a falling headline count as evidence that vacancies now close faster mixes up two different measurements, and plans on the wrong one.
What a shortage occupation is — and what the figure 157 measures
A shortage occupation is an occupation for which the Federal Employment Agency, in its skilled labour shortage analysis, establishes a shortage of skilled workers on the basis of several indicators. The classification is therefore the result of an evaluation of labour market data. It is not a self-declaration by employers, not a survey, and not a list of currently fashionable jobs.
Which indicators the analysis draws on in detail, how they are weighted and where their thresholds sit is set out in the methodology section of the report itself. This article does not reproduce that methodology and derives nothing from it. For day-to-day workforce planning, something simpler matters first: the classification applies to an occupation. Not to a single position, not to a location, not to an individual company.
What the figure does not count matters just as much. It does not count vacancies, it does not count missing people, and it does not count companies. It counts occupations. One occupation on the list may cover a very large workforce, another a very small one — in a sum of occupations, both carry exactly the same weight. That is precisely what makes the headline count a market observation figure rather than a planning figure for a single business.
The analysis is published by the Federal Employment Agency in the series “Berichte: Blickpunkt Arbeitsmarkt”; the edition covering the 2025 reporting year appeared in May 2026. It is a stocktake of a completed year, not a forecast for the current one. Read as a prediction, it is being asked to carry something it does not contain.
Three years, three figures: 183, 163, 157
On the trend, the Federal Employment Agency states that the number of shortage occupations has continued to fall compared with previous years. The agency puts the level for the 2025 reporting year at 157 shortage occupations, for 2024 at 163 shortage occupations and for 2023 at 183 shortage occupations.
Two consecutive declines make a direction. They do not make a statement about how hard it is to fill a position in any particular occupation. When an occupation drops out of the count, it disappears from the statistic — the positions in the occupations that remain do not become any easier to fill as a result. And why an individual occupation loses its classification cannot be read off the headline count in any case: it is a sum, and a sum does not name its components.
For an individual employer, that sum is therefore the wrong reference figure. It describes the labour market as a whole. Your workforce planning concerns one occupation, one requirement level, one location and a specific number of positions. There is no conversion factor between the one level and the other, and any conversion carried out anyway is an invention.
There is also a time lag. The analysis describes a completed reporting year; the position you want to fill belongs to the current one. Months pass between the cut-off date of an evaluation and the day a company publishes its job advertisement. For observing a market, that lag is irrelevant. For scheduling a hire, it is not.
So the direction of the curve produces not a single operational decision. It is useful for placing a report in context, not for answering the question of when a search has to start. That question is answered by a different indicator.
Why time-to-fill is not coming down with it
Alongside the number of shortage occupations there is a second indicator that needs no survey at all: the time-to-fill of reported vacancies. It measures how long a reported position stays unfilled on average. It measures a duration, not an assessment, and it cannot be talked up or down.
For the period from April 2025 to March 2026, the Federal Employment Agency reports the following values among others: 183 days at skilled worker level, 165 days across all requirement levels, 156 days for helper and semi-skilled roles, and 109 days at expert level.
The longest of these durations does not fall on roles requiring a university degree, but on those requiring completed vocational training. Why the order comes out that way is not something the statistic reports; it measures durations, not causes. What separates the requirement levels from one another, and why that classification comes before any search, is set out in detail in Professional, Specialist, Expert.
Individual occupations diverge further still. In the ranking of shortage occupations with the longest time-to-fill, interior fit-out and drywall construction stands in first place for the same period at 301 days, according to the Federal Employment Agency. That is not an outlier at the edge of a table. It is the top value of the very list an employer consults when scheduling a construction project.
Place the two measures side by side and the apparent contradiction stands out: fewer shortage occupations, and at the same time vacancies open for many months. It is resolved by what each of the two figures actually measures. The reading that follows emerges from the figures themselves; it is not a statement by the Federal Employment Agency.
The number of shortage occupations measures the breadth of the shortage: across how many occupations one is established at all. Time-to-fill measures the depth: how long it takes, within a single occupation, until a position is off the desk. Breadth and depth are two different dimensions of the same finding, and they can move in opposite directions without either figure being wrong.
For the individual business, depth is the decisive dimension. A list that gets shorter fills no position. What a duration of many months does to everyday operations — in overtime, declined orders and postponed deadlines — is described in Why Your Vacancy Stays Open for Ten Months.
Where the electrical trades appear in the analysis
The analysis becomes concrete where it names individual occupations. The Federal Employment Agency lists “Berufe in der Bauelektrik” (building electrical installation occupations, occupational sub-group 2621) in its table of the shortage occupations with the largest workforces at skilled worker level, the top ten.
That table does not sort by the severity of a shortage. It sorts by workforce size. It answers the question of which classified occupations employ particularly large numbers of people. For an electrical contracting business, that means the occupation you are trying to recruit for does not sit at the margin of the evaluation, but in its front group.
One level up, the analysis is equally clear. At the specialist requirement level, the Federal Employment Agency establishes a shortage of skilled workers for 48 occupational categories, and electrical engineering is named there explicitly. The shortage therefore affects the electrical trades not only at the level of completed vocational training, but at the qualification level above it as well.
The individual indicator values on which the analysis bases these classifications are deliberately left out here. They belong in the report and cannot sensibly be lifted out of it. Anyone who wants to argue with them should cite the report, not a summary of it.
What follows for practice is a question about your own occupation rather than about the headline count. How the finding plays out for the electrical trades in the candidate market is described in more depth in Electricians wanted: why the market cannot fill your role.
What a business can do with the figure — and what it cannot
The question that holds up is not whether the situation is improving. It is whether your own occupation is classified, and how long your own position is likely to stay open. Three steps turn the statistic into a plan.
First: classify your own occupation. Check whether the occupation you are recruiting for is listed as a shortage occupation in the skilled labour shortage analysis, and at which requirement level that applies. An occupation can be classified at one level and not at another. The headline count of shortage occupations is of no help in that check.
Second: plan with the duration, not with the direction. Use the reported time-to-fill for your requirement level in your planning, not the hope of an easing market. For skilled worker level, the Federal Employment Agency reports 183 days, roughly six months. That clock starts on the date the person would be needed at the earliest — the time before that, for the decision, the job description and the advertisement, is added on top.
Third: count backwards. Fix the date by which the position is to be filled and subtract the duration from it. The result is the day on which the search has to begin at the latest. If the person is to be fully inducted by a particular date, add the induction period in front of that as well. Anyone who only starts searching when an employee hands in their notice has already lost those months.
Information for orientation only, not legal advice.
These three steps change nothing about the market. They change the day on which you start looking, and that day is decided by your business alone. Structure beats chance.
The number of shortage occupations is falling; the pressure in the occupations that remain is not falling with it. That is not a contradiction, it is the difference between a market observation and a workforce plan. Why the gap has less to do with missing people than with the way recruiting is done in Germany is set out in Germany has a recruitment problem.
Free initial consultation — we will call you back, when suits you? In 15 minutes we will classify your occupation, your requirement level and the realistic duration for your open position.
Further reading
- 301 Days: The Cost of a Vacant Position in Construction — the top value of the time-to-fill list and what it does to a business
- Filling helper roles: 156 days is the average — the duration for helper and semi-skilled roles in detail
- Time-to-fill by federal state: 72 days apart — how far the same indicator diverges by region
- Professional, Specialist, Expert — which level applies to your position
- International nurses are the norm — what international hiring already looks like in one sector
Sources
- Bundesagentur für Arbeit: Fachkräfteengpassanalyse 2025. Series “Berichte: Blickpunkt Arbeitsmarkt”. May 2026. https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/en/press/2026-32-specialists-remain-in-short-supply-immigration-continues-to-grow-in-importance (retrieved 13.09.2026).
- Bundesagentur für Arbeit: Time-to-fill of vacancies by requirement level in Germany, April 2025 to March 2026, compiled by Statista. 2026. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1318407/umfrage/vakanzzeit-gemeldeter-arbeitsstellen-nach-anforderungsniveau (retrieved 13.09.2026).
- Bundesagentur für Arbeit: Shortage occupations with the longest times-to-fill, April 2025 to March 2026, compiled by Statista. 2026. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/420385/umfrage/engpassberufe-in-deutschland-nach-durchschnittlicher-vakanzzeit (retrieved 13.09.2026).
