Environmental Education in Vocational Training - an Analysis of Measures and Requirements

The environmental economy has become one of the most important economic sectors in Germany. The segment is not just growing constantly but also provides highly qualified jobs. Employment sectors such as energy and resource management, climate protection, and recycling management have one thing in common: they highly trained employees, mostly from science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so called STEM professions. The efforts of increasing the number of those who choose a corresponding education are not sufficient according to previous findings. Also, there are still more men opting for an appropriate training or study. Therefore, the federal government aims to increase the number of young people and especially women in STEM professions.

Thus, there is a special focus on the question of how young men and women could be motivated to choose a technical education or engineering studies. In the course of this it is analyzed, whether environmental protection as a motive can be used as a vehicle in order to address this target group more successfully. The success factors of measures for raising interest for STEM professions (e.g. school labs, mentoring, information campaigns) are analysed to develop recommendations for future activities which contribute to increasing the number of young people and especially young women in corresponding trainings or courses of study.