2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Known as the land of poets, thinkers and engineers Germany nowadays is threatened by an increasing shortage of skilled workers in engineering fields that can have severe consequences for the innovative capacity of science, business and economics. Consequently, the declared aim of current activities from many different initiatives and institutions is to promote a sustained interest in technical careers and to increase the number of persons who earn corresponding qualifications. Although not a few have been working on them for two decades, the offerings for encouraging technical career choices have to date not been sufficient to really prevent a shortage of academically trained engineers. To discuss this challenge, this paper first describes the today situation of recruiting young talents for engineering together with interdependencies and determinants of the individual decision-making process that has to be considered. Aspects and contexts of the problem and are then explained in order to distinguish between short term and sustainable solutions. For that, it presents details of technology socialization as an important but underrated key factor, issues from individual educational economics decisions and findings about the importance of an early and continuous offer of technology education. As a result, it comes out interest in technology should be awakened and maintained primarily through continuous, didactically effective promotion of young talents, enriched by key experiences. This support must begin in early childhood and continue throughout all phases of education.