Around 2,300 young people have begun vocational training this year at Siemens in Germany; about 1,700 are being trained for professional careers at the company, while a further 600 are from external partners.

As in previous years, around 80% will focus on technical subjects and IT.

Siemens (www.siemens.com) offers a variety of apprenticeships, including those in electronics, mechatronics, machining and specialised informatics.

About 40% of the training positions are in work-study programmes, which allow participants to achieve a degree in engineering or a science — or complete a fully integrated work-study programme at Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University.

Siemens’ training centres are also ‘state of the art’; the new Siemens Campus Erlangen, which covers an area of 10,000m², contains modern workshops, laboratories, seminar rooms and multi-purpose rooms for around 1,200 apprentices.

For the sixth time, a new group of apprentices is starting the company’s international vocational programme in Berlin.

Up to now, this has operated under the name Europeans@Siemens, but in the past few years an increasing number of participants have come from countries outside Europe, hence the programme’s new name — International Tech Apprenticeship@Siemens.

With about 11,500 apprentices and work-study programme participants world-wide, Siemens is one of the world’s largest private training companies.

In Germany alone, Siemens has about 9,200 young people in its apprenticeship and work-study programmes, of whom around 6,700 are being trained for careers in the company and a further 2,500 for external partners.

In 2016, Siemens invested about 240 million euros in training young people, of which 189 million euros was spent in Germany.