Companies in the automotive industry with a focus on electromobility are looking for significantly more workers than those with a focus on combustion technology. This is shown by an analysis of over 1.5 million job advertisements in Germany by the ifo Institute and the online job portal Indeed. While the demand for labor was the same until spring 2019, since then the demand for labor from companies with a focus on electromobility has been 34 to 50 percentage points higher on average than for companies that focus primarily on conventional engines. At the end of 2023, the difference was as much as 60 percentage points. However, the gap will shrink again at the beginning of 2024.
Even before spring 2019, companies with a focus on electromobility were looking for more skilled workers in the areas of software development, industrial engineering and sales and less in the areas of technology, mechanics and logistics compared to companies with a focus on combustion technology. “The differences in labor demand reflect the profound structural change in the automotive industry,” says Oliver Falck, Director of the ifo Center for Industrial Organization and New Technologies. “With intensified competition, global trade conflicts, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, structural change in the German automotive industry has once again accelerated considerably.”
“Companies in the automotive industry perform better on the labor market when they focus on sustainable drive technologies. The combustion engine, the classic domain of German engineering, is becoming less important as a job driver,” says Annina Hering, labor market researcher at Indeed. At the same time, other areas are becoming more important due to a stronger focus on infotainment or automated driving applications, for example software development. “The structural change requires fundamentally new business models that are more digitally oriented, which means, for example, that new sales channels with more direct marketing are being established,” says Moritz Goldbeck, co-author of the study. However, the current weak sales and renewed discussion about the end of the combustion engine is causing increasing uncertainty and is noticeably slowing down the transformation to electromobility.
The study examines over 1.5 million online job advertisements from Indeed in the period from January 2018 to April 2024. This corresponds to the demand for jobs from 2166 companies active in the automotive sector in Germany. The companies are differentiated according to their patent portfolios in drive technology.
