In Germany, migrants less frequently engage in further learning and have fewer opportunities on the labour market. And this even though everyone bears competences and potential. It is our mission to campaign for a better educational counselling of people with migrant backgrounds – to ensure equal opportunities for everyone.
People with a migrant background and refugees possess significantly lower chances to receive proper education and occupational opportunities than Germans without a migrant background. Especially people with a low level of formal qualification have a hard time in Germany. This increases their risk to enter poverty and unemployment, plus their participation is impeded. The result: people that arrive to Germany with valuable sets of competences and prior experience are being marginalised and ignored within society. This is neither justifiable nor desirable and therefore unacceptable.
But some progress was made over the past years. The validation of foreign certifications has been simplified with the BQFG/typo3/ . This was also the moment when a larger diversity of guidance and counselling opportunities for migrants were installed. What still remains to be done is a linkage of all available offers in accordance with a resource-orientated stance: what can somebody do, what are somebody’s competences and potentials? The Bertelsmann Stiftung, together with partners in migration and validation advisories, as well as counselling, education, migration and labour market experts, works towards developing a competence-orientated potential analysis for immigration counselling.
We have developed competence cards for the practical use in educational counselling of migrants. We show, what opportunities for a competence-orientated potential analysis exist and how these can be successfully implemented in practice. By doing so, we support educational counsellors in their work with people with a migrant background. This joint development process with many partners from different segments of the counselling-system secures the applicability of the competence cards. Intermediately we want to improve the education and occupational opportunities of migrants and refugees in Germany.