Hamburg shortage of skilled workers in IT
“Every profession is affected by digitization”
Status: 1:39 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Called Vedder by Julia Witte
Dalia Das, founder of the training and qualification company “neue fische” in Hamburg
What: Bertold Fabricius
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Hamburg-based Dalia Das and her company “neue Fisch” train career changers in express training courses to become IT specialists. The idea comes from the USA.
According to a survey by the umbrella organization of chambers of industry and commerce, every fifth company in Germany complains about a lack of IT specialists. The problem is also home-made, say experts, because the demand cannot be met with graduates of classic IT courses and training. New approaches are needed.
Dalia Das is one of those who try such new approaches. The 46-year-old is the founder of the education and qualification company “neue fische – School and Pool for Digital Talent” and relies on career changers as a solution to the shortage of skilled workers. It has been offering IT boot camps based on the US model since 2018 and has around 2,000 alumni to date. There are now practical intensive training courses in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne and Bochum. You can participate nationwide in live online mode.
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When it was founded, Dalia Das would not have necessarily thought that her company would one day become so big. As a project manager, including at Bertelsmann, the business administration graduate spent a lot of time in the USA, getting to know the coding camps that were already established there. These are intensive courses in which the participants learn in an application-oriented manner, above all how to use programming languages and IT tools for specific projects. “In the USA, these boot camps were already focused on career changers as a solution to the shortage of skilled workers,” says Das. She therefore firmly believed in the potential of her foundation.
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The ever faster changing world of work was a decisive factor in the fact that the new offer hit a nerve. The company grew. After 60 graduates in the first year, there are likely to be almost 2,000 people who will be trained in the courses in 2023 alone. It has long since gone beyond pure coding – the programs range from web, Java and cloud development, user experience design, machine learning to digital data analysis.
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“Every profession is now affected by digitization,” says Dalia Das, sitting in her office in Hamburg’s Bahrenfeld district. She wakes her computer from sleep mode with a click of the mouse and updates herself with hardly any more clicks. She programmed the dashboard, i.e. the user interface of the computer, herself so that she always sees exactly what she needs at the moment.
She knows that many employees in non-IT companies are unfamiliar with the new requirements. In the survey by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce, almost one in three entrepreneurs surveyed stated that the greatest obstacles to digitization were acceptance by employees.
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“You can no longer avoid upskilling employees,” agrees Robert Neuhann, Head of Personnel Recruitment for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at Accenture Song. “It’s mandatory.” Companies that try to cover their need for skilled workers solely with external hires would fail with this strategy in the long run, believes the Hamburg native, who has also been looking for staff for Xing. At Accenture, for example, there is in-house training in SAP. However, a company cannot offer everything in-house.
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Back in Dalia Das’s office, she lists some of her graduates’ previous jobs. Chemists were just as much among them as elementary school teachers. Programming skills are not absolutely necessary to take part in the training courses, says the 46-year-old. What is important is openness to digital topics and the will to learn new things and develop further.
More than 10,400 companies in Hamburg are currently part of the IT sector and, according to calculations by the Chamber of Commerce, have more than 41,000 employees. But that no longer reflects the job market for skilled workers with IT skills. “Many of our participants want to stay in their professional field, but position themselves more digitally,” says Dalia Das. In the meantime, more and more applications are coming from employees in human resources, marketing or project management – “classic interface positions”. In order to meet this demand, the founder has now also included the IT project manager training course and now also the further training for data practitioners in the program.
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Eva Heinemann is a graduate of the first part-time camp. After the birth of her second child, she went back to work. But during the family break, a lot had changed in her old job. “I noticed that the data topic has become much more important. The need to make decisions on a data-driven basis has increased.” She did not feel sufficiently prepared for this. “Everything is developing faster and faster and I felt like I was only scratching the surface. I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of where the data that we use for our decisions comes from and what else can be gleaned from the data.” Heinemann gave up his job in marketing and went back to school for six months. Always in the morning when the children were taken care of.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is required, since the providers of the embedded content as third-party providers require this consent [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (which can be revoked at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can withdraw your consent at any time via the switch and via privacy at the bottom of the page.