2023-08-08 06:41:00
“It is still a major challenge to find qualified employees, even if we see a greater supply of labor in individual areas and with regional differences due to the economic downturn,” said the spokesman for the voestalpine steel group, Peter Felsbach APA. At the beginning of the summer, the company was looking for 3,000 skilled workers. The company currently has around 400 vacancies in Austria alone – around 170 each in Upper Austria and Styria and around 60 in Lower Austria.
“From our point of view, the shortage of skilled workers is not an Austrian phenomenon – personnel recruiting is difficult in many regions,” reports Felsbach. In an international comparison, it is said to be particularly challenging in Europe to find suitable employees. In this regard, the company spokesman emphasized Germany, for example, in addition to Austria. But also the US.
“The demographic development is one of the reasons for this,” says Felsbach. “We see an increasing need for qualified employees in many economic regions.”
With the disappearance of the high-birth-rate baby boomer generation, who are now gradually retiring, the personnel problem in the economy is becoming increasingly acute. According to the information provided, voestalpine is looking for around 2,000 employees in Austria every year. In the 2022/23 financial year, which ended at the end of March, around 6,700 new jobs were concluded group-wide, including internal group changes.
Internationally, the steel giant currently employs 51,200 people (full-time equivalents) in 50 countries, 23,000 of whom (45.3 percent) are in Austria.
“We invest heavily in education and training,” said Felsbach. In the 2023/24 financial year, the steel technology company made more than 60 million euros available for this across the entire group. According to the information, a good 81 percent of all employees took advantage of measures from the offer.
voestalpine is one of the largest industrial apprentice trainers in Austria and operates training centers at 15 locations in this country. Around 940 apprentices are currently being trained there in 30 trades – worldwide there are 1,400 apprentices in 50 trades.
The next year will start in autumn with a planned 400 new apprentices in Austria – that’s more than the average of around 350 new recruits in previous years. According to the group, almost all positions are filled for September. However, the requirements might also change continuously during the year.
The total budget that the industrial company spends per apprentice has increased from 70,000 to over 90,000 euros in recent years. Currently, 17 percent of technical apprentices are female. In Austria, the proportion of women in technical professions is 19 percent, internationally it is 23 percent. “It is also particularly important to us to further increase the proportion of women at all levels – from technical professions to managerial positions,” emphasized the group spokesman. For the time being, there is not a single woman on the voestalpine Management Board.
In order to “ensure the training of skilled workers in Styria”, Voest is currently building a new residential building for around 60 apprentices in Kapfenberg – construction is now to start in the summer. According to current planning, the apprenticeship campus will be completed in 2025.
At the Styrian location, the new high-grade steel plant is also scheduled to go into full operation this year, in which 205,000 tons of special steels can be produced annually for the international aviation, oil and gas, automotive and toolmaking industries. The highly automated plant with around 100 jobs, which costs up to 455 million euros, is intended to secure a total of 3,500 jobs in Kapfenberg.
In Upper Austria, too, the group is taking further steps to be attractive as an employer. From September, voestalpine in Linz will be the first local industrial company to offer around-the-clock childcare for children up to the age of 12. The offer is aimed at parents who work in shifts and also applies to weekends and public holidays.
The rooms required for this are located in the crèche or in the kindergarten of the plant. The family-oriented care offer for eight children will be started for the time being, it can still be expanded. At the same time, the capacities in day care were increased from 90 to 200 places in May this year.
Voest has already made the strenuous shift work more flexible in recent years. There are various working time models such as an adapted 4-shift and the so-called 5-shift model. The aim was new working hours with more recovery phases – away from the high number of hours in the direction of 32 hours per week. This means a larger block of free time and fewer night shifts, but also less money. In general, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people who want to work more than 40 hours a week.
Other signs of the times: climate change is also having an impact on recruiting. voestalpine, which as an energy-intensive group is one of the largest CO2 emitters in Austria, naturally has an industrial image. The company is already working intensively on reducing its CO2 emissions by up to 30 percent or 4 million tons from 2027. Voest’s contribution to domestic air pollution is considerable. The measure mentioned should reduce Austria’s total CO2 emissions by around 5 percent. This should succeed with “green” steel (“greentec steel”), which is produced in electric furnaces instead of in blast furnaces. The changeover can cost the group 1.5 billion euros. By 2050, Voest wants to further decarbonize in the direction of CO2 neutrality.
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