The New Job Engine

Energy and climate protection are important issues for Tobias Schulze. He wants to make them his career. The 22-year-old is in his second year at the Giessen University of Applied Sciences studying energy systems technology. He is enthusiastic about his practice-oriented course. In the tutorials and lectures he is learning all about energy conversion, power generation, technical infrastructure, CO2 emissions from power stations and even vehicle technology – a wide range of subjects, but he can specialize in one of them at any time. Tobias is in his element at university. “I want to understand things and see how they work.” And the more he understands, the more he will be able to put into practice in his future career – either as a result of new research findings or new processes in the field of renewable energies.

He is part of a major trend. A recent study carried out by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants has shown that energy and ecology-related occupations are becoming Germany’s number-one job engine. “By 2020, this sector will be employing more people than mechanical engineering or the automotive industry,” says Torsten Henzelmann of Roland Berger. He talks about “the boom sector of the 21st century”. On behalf of the Federal Government, the consultants interviewed almost 1,500 German environmental technology companies and evaluated a number of other studies in order to compile an eco-atlas of Germany that will be officially published at the European Union’s environmental summit in June.

The renewable energies industry is the pacemaker among the new job creators. Companies’ order books are full, boosted by the Federal Government’s target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2020. This year, the German Renewable Energy Federation (BEE) expects turnover to grow by 17% compared to 2006 to a grand total of 32 billion euros. At the same time, 15,000 new jobs are planned in Germany this year. According to the BEE, approximately 214,000 people were already employed in the industry in 2006. A study conducted by the Federal Ministry for the Environment projects that 150,000 new jobs will be created by 2020. The background is that German companies are already market leaders and are now benefiting from the increasing global demand for clean and innovative energy technologies.

In the environment industry there is increasing demand mainly for technical and scientific specialists, such as engineers, mechanical engineers, chemists, physicists and project developers. However, the industry also needs training opportunities, which is why Sigmar Gabriel, Federal Minister for the Environment, launched a training initiative called “Umwelt schafft Perspektiven” (The Environment Creates Prospects) in 2006. It has also been a success: companies and employers’ associations have already promised 5,100 new training places. Universities and colleges in Germany have already adjusted to this development in the field of renewable energies. Many of them now offer special programmes or options in this area within their courses. For example, degree courses in mechanical engineering often allow students to concentrate or specialize on fields such as renewable-energy and materials technology, energy supply and renewable energies for power generation. Similarly, traditional courses in electrical engineering and information technology now frequently offer specializations in renewable energies and electrical energy systems. Universities and colleges offer further subdivisions such as technical building services, energy plant technology, power engineering, environmental technology and wind energy technology. In addition, there are numerous further training courses on offer, for example as a solar or energy consultant. The degree courses are modular in structure and usually last seven semesters. They are very practice-oriented – practical work experience within a company is usually part of the main study programme.

What kind of people are attracted by the energy professions? Oliver Freitag, for example, who has turned his environmentalist ideals into a well-paid job. Today, he is head of the Fuel Cell division at Smart Fuel Cell (SFC), the market leader in mobile and stand-alone power-supply systems based on fuel-cell technology. Ten years ago his professor warned him against writing his thesis on solar chemistry. “You’ll never get a job,” he believed at the time. Today, Oliver Freitag works on fuel cells for the leisure industry, for example in mobile homes, vacation cottages and sailing boats. “This will be a big market in the future,” enthuses the 36-year-old engineer. The technology transforms liquid energy sources into electricity and is 30 to 50 times more effective than batteries. What is more it is clean and quiet. Other exciting markets are already waiting in the wings. Electric vehicles, sensors of all kinds, security technology, pipelines, weather stations. Freitag has realized that idealism is not enough, and that it is important for projects to be economically viable. He has now found this balance in his job.

Thomas Schilling had actually wanted to study physics, but in the end he felt it was too specialized. So he studied architecture in Munich. It was a good decision, because he now realizes that interdisciplinary qualifications are better received than pure specializations. As a result, he has expanded his technical know-how and learned a great deal about energy optimization and thermodynamics. As an architect he pursues a holistic approach anyway: “Planning a house is an integrated mental exercise.” On the idyllic Wörthersee lake in Upper Bavaria he has just built a wooden house that is heated with wood pellets and solar energy. His knowledge of architecture also stood the 38-year-old in good stead in his work as a self-employed energy consultant. Since 2002, he has been calculating the energy efficiency of houses and forecasting their reconstruction requirements in his Munich office.

Deborah Hoheisel would like to make sure that nature reserves and areas of wilderness stay just as they are – without interference from human beings. For this reason, and because she was already interested in the environment as a child, she studied environmental planning at the Technical University in Munich. The 24-year-old’s training is varied, ranging from basic scientific principles to countryside management and public relations. She likes the informal atmosphere in her department and praises the good relations with the professors. She already has her bachelor’s degree in her pocket, and now she is staying on to take her master’s. Just like Julie Gassmann – she took her bachelor’s degree in England, but preferred to take her master’s in environmental planning and ecological engineering in her home country. “Germany has a stronger tradition in the ecological fields,” the 23-year-old explains – even though she will be on campus for six months longer. She says she needs the time to discover her “real interests”. Would she prefer to go into hands-on nature conservation, or would she rather do research? She doesn’t know for sure yet. But she has time. After all, there is no end in sight to the boom in environmental careers.

© Deutschland magazine

A European City in Two Countries

Surely this must be Italy... The square is surrounded by four-storey Renaissance buildings: yellow, dusky-pink and pale-green façades with balconies and half-relief figures. In front of the old Rathsapotheke (town pharmacy) on the Untermarkt (Lower Market), young people sit under sunshades, sipping cappuccino and latte macchiato. A row of houses with Baroque façades curves gently down from the square to the river. On the way there, large, wide-open gates – some grey, one ox-blood red with dark metal hinges, one with a grim-looking golden lion’s head – reveal courtyards bathed in light. We are in the east, not the south. No German town lies further east than Görlitz. This is where the Federal Republic ends: on the River Neisse, at 15 degrees east – the central meridian for the Central European Time zone. If you turn and look up at the rocky plateau, you can see the Church of St. Peter and Paul with its Gothic towers soaring into the blue sky. Next to it is the Waidhaus, a small fortress: the town’s oldest secular building where everything began in post-unification Görlitz. This building, then on the point of collapse, was the first to be renovated.

Wall paintings you’d expect in palaces

Fortune did not smile on Görlitz during the GDR years, and it was in state of dilapidation by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. While huge sums of money had gone to East Berlin and into building so-called socialist cities like Eisenhüttenstadt and Hoyerswerda, the once proud Görlitz faded into the shadows because of its position on the periphery. Görlitz residents say there were plans in the 1970s to demolish the entire city centre and put up new buildings – for safety reasons. Although the idea was dropped for lack of money, the first blast holes had already been drilled into some of the façades by 1989, recalls Michael Vogel, who heads the Municipal Authority for the Protection of Monuments and Historical Buildings.

Many East German towns including Görlitz were saved in the nick of time after the communist system collapsed in 1989. The ensuing regime change meant that Görlitz town centre’s complete ensemble of houses – which represents the styles of the last 500 years and is unique in Germany – could be preserved. Today, the most magnificent buildings can be seen on Görlitz’s Untermarkt (Lower Market). Ingrid Bäther proudly leads us into her apartment in the centre of town. “The first time I saw Görlitz, I was absolutely thrilled,” says Ingrid, who was born in Lübeck. She immediately fell in love with the old merchant houses on the Untermarkt. The buildings are particularly striking witnesses to past affluence. They were built at a time when many of Görlitz’s citizens had become rich through the cloth trade. These bourgeois houses contain the kind of magnificent wall paintings and elaborate wooden ceilings you would expect to find in a small palace rather than here. Admittedly, the Görlitz citizens who once lived here had amassed the biggest fortunes and liked to show it. The people of Görlitz call these unique buildings the “Lange Lauben” (Long Arcades) because of their huge entrance halls. Coaches used to be kept and goods sold there.

Superb apartments at reasonable prices

Pensioner Ingrid Bäther campaigns unceasingly for Görlitz – and has managed to lure several pensioners from west Germany to the extreme east of the Republic. Although people started moving away after unification because they could no longer stand the dreariness and the dirt from the nearby open-cast lignite mine, these days more people are coming to live in Görlitz than are leaving, so that the population has been stable at 56,000 for some time. “That brings life back into the town and creates jobs. And we have more than enough superb apartments at reasonable prices,” says Mayor Joachim Paulick. After many years of gloomy prospects on the labour market, today some industries in Görlitz are desperately looking for young, skilled workers – e.g. engineers for the rolling-stock and turbine factories.

Big business thrives in Görlitz’s Lutherstrasse. In the sprawling 19th century red-brick industrial plant, Siemens builds steam turbines as big as houses for customers all over the world. Machines have been produced in Görlitz since 1847, and the town was soon gripped by industrialization when it was connected with the railway network and became an important junction between Berlin, Prague, Dresden and Breslau. In the early 20th century, when the age of the steam engine was over, Görlitz’s engineering industry discovered steam turbines – with great success. And the factory was not liquidated after unification; Siemens took it over. Today, the company is the world market leader in the construction of industrial steam turbines, and the Görlitz works with its 800 employees is the company’s turbine headquarters. “From here we run our other companies, for example in India, Brazil, Sweden and the Czech Republic,” says René Umlauft, head of the “Turbosets” division.

Another company has also survived all upheavals: Waggonbau Görlitz, the town’s rolling-stock manufacturer. Double-decker railway coaches made at the factory, which today belongs to the Bombardier group, can be found on local and regional trains all over Germany. And the traction units in the German high-speed ICE tilt trains were also built in the Görlitz factory, where 1,350 employees work today. The factory, a “core location” in the group, is just as successful on international markets, exporting its products to Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Israel and 21 other countries on three continents. The Görlitz company is currently involved in the construction of Bucharest’s underground system and recently won the contract for an underground railway in New Delhi.

Reconstructing the historic centre

Hardly any other region has benefited more from German unification and EU enlargement than the Oberlausitz (Upper Lusatia) region of Lower Silesia. This delightful part of the country, which has been on the important Via Regia trading route between west and east since time immemorial, fell into a European no-man’s-land after the Second World War. In the Potsdam Agreement the Allies gave Poland the German territories to the east of the River Neisse, and with them the eastern part of Görlitz. The two towns turned their backs on each other, and for many years the shallow River Neisse in the middle of Görlitz was an almost insurmountable demarcation line. Today, Görlitz again lies at the heart of Europe. “These days, we are no longer at the end of Germany, but at the beginning,” says Mayor Paulick.

Since 1990, and even more so since Poland’s accession to the European Union, the region has been seeking to build on its great Central European traditions – and not only economically. Görlitz and Zgorzelec call themselves one European city: the theatres cooperate, representatives from the two councils meet regularly, and there are German-Polish kindergartens in both Görlitz and Zgorzelec. School classes have a partner class on the other side. Görlitz and Zgorzelec together applied for the title of 2010 European Capital of Culture and pursued their candidature with great commitment, attracting nationwide attention. Although the two towns lost the battle to Essen a year ago, they are now much better-known – and are implementing many of the things they planned anyway. For example, they are going to renovate the Stadthalle (the “guildhall” whose concert hall used to be regarded as the most beautiful between Leipzig and Breslau) on the Görlitz side and the Dom Kultury (former memorial hall) on the Zgorzelec side. Even more important for the two towns is a project that has no direct connection with the failed candidacy: the reconstruction of the Postplatz (Post Square) on the Zgorzelec side; here, at its historical centre, Görlitz/Zgorzelec wants to grow back together. The two town councils are planning this together: Zgorzelec’s town architect Adam Cebula is responsible for all architectural issues, Peter Mitsching, whose job is to look after Görlitz’s cityscape, is in charge of colour design, not only for the Postplatz but also for the historic buildings on the Polish bank of the Neisse, e.g. the house where the famous mystic Jacob Böhme lived. Everyone agrees that the Görlitz side, much of which has been beautifully renovated, and the re-emerging Zgorzelec side should also grow together optically.

Cooperation in industry is also bearing fruit: Siemens’ turbine factory intends to open a branch in Zgorzelec soon, a small office for young engineers from Poland. Specialists are scarce in Germany, so with an office in this pretty double-town Siemens hopes to attract young Polish technicians who don’t really want to leave their home country.

© Deutschland magazine