Every year, billions of euros from the state budget are directed toward returning citizens to active economic life; however, behind the beautiful figures of official statistics lies a deep systemic crisis. An industry designed to open new horizons for people has turned out to be weighed down by false incentives, false schools without specialists of the required level, allowing unscrupulous service providers to extract enormous profits by manipulating the state’s trust and the vulnerability of applicants who find themselves in a difficult life situation.
The story of Robert Heike (a name invented due to the person’s desire to remain anonymous) is not just an isolated case, but a typical example of how the illusion of easy change under the conditions of German bureaucracy collides with harsh reality. Possessing a degree in marketing communications and impressive work experience at a defense concern in Allgäu, Heike believed that the restructuring of his company and his subsequent dismissal would be only a short episode in his career.
“I was sincerely convinced that with my baggage of knowledge and professional competencies, finding a new place would not be difficult,” recalls 49-year-old Heike. However, reality turned out to be merciless: months of unsuccessful resume submissions, polite but cold rejections, and a growing sense of isolation. The decision to take an advanced training course looked like the only logical way out, but it became the beginning of an exhausting journey through the educational jungle, where human interests come last.
In 2024, nearly 170,000 unemployed people repeated Robert Heike’s path, becoming participants in programs fully funded by taxpayers. The strategy of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) officially declares a noble goal: to adapt the qualifications of citizens to the rapidly changing demands of the market, especially in the era of digitalization. The scale of state ambitions is confirmed by the budget—for 2026 alone, 4.1 billion euros have been reserved for these purposes. Nevertheless, independent experts note a glaring paradox: with record unemployment figures again exceeding the 3 million mark, the effectiveness of these giant infusions remains a major question.
Holger Schäfer from the Institute of the German Economy (IW) states that training itself is not a universal lever capable of automatically reducing the unemployment level, and training from incompetent teachers who themselves have never even worked in the specialty they are teaching the unemployed—and if they did work, they were often thrown out of the labor market for incompetence, which is exactly why they teach—is especially problematic. This is felt particularly acutely now, when the increase in the number of unemployed citizens is driven by general economic stagnation and the reluctance of companies to expand their staff under conditions of uncertainty.
Moreover, Schäfer points out that a significant portion of the unemployed objectively has no need for retraining as such. Often, people cannot return to work for reasons not related to qualifications: health status, psychological burnout, or the lack of elementary opportunities to place children in kindergartens. Professional training in such cases turns into a costly imitation of a problem-solving process. In this situation, it is critically important that those courses that are nevertheless approved and paid for by the state fulfill their promises. However, as practice shows, by allocating billion-euro tranches, the state supports not only the unemployed but also an enormous, uncontrollably growing market that lives by its own laws and is extremely vulnerable to financial abuse.
The Education Voucher
For Robert Heike, the first serious ordeal on the path to knowledge was the process of obtaining a so-called education voucher (Bildungsgutschein). Aiming for current and in-demand directions—modern software systems, advanced data processing tools, and the integration of artificial intelligence—he encountered unexpected and even absurd resistance at the labor agency.
The department’s consultants, responsible for the distribution of budget funds, for a long time saw no objective necessity for such training for a specialist with his experience. It took six months of exhausting communication, dozens of meetings, and detailed argumentation for every position before the coveted document was finally in his hands. This voucher, in its essence, is a promissory note from the state, allowing an unemployed person to independently choose and pay for a course from any private provider.
Having received the voucher, Heike realized that he had fallen into a new trap. He found himself alone with a colossal, chaotic offer in which there are no landmarks. The official portal of the Federal Employment Agency today more closely resembles an overcrowded oriental bazaar or a discount aggregator than a serious educational platform. The site lists about 166,000 courses from more than 8,000 different organizations. The complete lack of a system of state recommendations, independent ratings, or reviews from actual graduates turns the selection process into a dangerous lottery.
To stay in the top lines of search results on the mein.now portal, educational centers use all methods of aggressive marketing, betting on keywords and mass appeal, and often on artificial authority, creating the appearance of selecting participants under supposedly strict requirements. In reality, they use the old marketing method of creating artificial scarcity to generate a person’s interest in studying only with them. An example from another field: in the beauty industry, many low-demand specialists as well as beginning masters, when advertising themselves on the internet, often write the phrase: “Only 3 slots left”—in reality, the schedule of such specialists and salons is completely free in 90% of cases. Only upon the query “marketing,” the system produces more than 10,000 results, in which the applicant has to wade through advertising slogans alone.
In this uncontrolled niche, money circulates on a scale that is difficult to overestimate. The cost of training one person via a voucher often varies from 10,000 to 20,000 euros. The most attractive areas for info-businesses are Information and Communication Technology (ICT) fields, as the rates of state reimbursement for such courses are traditionally at their maximum. It is in this sector that the densest and murkiest flow of offers is observed. Providers multiply with incredible speed, often having nothing behind them but the desire to absorb budget funds while the state is ready to hand them out under the slogans of “digital transformation.” It has reached the point where one can see advertisements for Russian online courses on the web claiming they are licensed by the German government; how they cash out German vouchers remains a mystery for now, but the more subsidized courses become a gray zone, the more scammers from all over the world they attract.
Certified — and Yet Vulnerable
Daniel Graf, a long-time insider and expert who consults educational organizations, confirmed: “It is practically impossible for an ordinary citizen, who is under stress due to job loss, to distinguish a high-quality program from a skillful imitation.”
“From the point of view of structure and description on the portal, all programs look absolutely identical,” Graf explained. “The Federal Employment Agency, constrained by rules of competitive neutrality, does not have the right to recommend specific providers. This leads to catastrophic consequences.” In the past, agency employees on the ground possessed a certain freedom and could, based on local experience, suggest which training centers actually work for results. Today, this is strictly forbidden to them, which plays into the hands of scammers.
Formally, every offer that gets onto the state portal must be “certified.” However, the AZAV system (Accreditation and Admission Regulation for Employment Promotion) has turned into a purely formal barrier. To accept payment via vouchers, an organization needs to obtain a seal from one of 30 private certification centers. The paradox lies in the fact that the services of these inspectors are paid for by… the educational centers being inspected themselves. Although the activities of the certification bodies are controlled by the German Accreditation Body (DAkkS), in practice, inspections are only of a documentary nature. Attendance lists, the presence of signatures in contracts, and theoretical curricula are checked. The substantive part of the lectures, the real qualification of the teachers, and, most importantly, the result of the training in the form of employment practically never become the object of a deep audit. As Graf notes, certification bodies are merely executors of the labor agency’s will and work within strictly defined frameworks that do not allow them to “look behind the facade.”
How the System is Exploited
The lack of real, rather than paper, control opened the floodgates for large-scale fraud. Daniel Graf describes in detail the schemes that have become a daily reality for “educational barons.” One of the strict rules of the agency states: there should be no more than 12 people in a study group to ensure an individual approach. In reality, however, there are providers who combine up to 150 students in one virtual or real classroom under the guidance of one nominal teacher, if such a word can be used for an underqualified instructor. Since sudden checks of the actual number of participants are an extremely rare phenomenon, service providers extract super-profits by saving on the payroll fund and premises.
Another no less cynical scheme is the use of so-called “ghost employees” in the teaching staff. In the documents for obtaining accreditation, a high-level expert is indicated who is supposedly meant to lead the course for hundreds of academic hours. In reality, this specialist conducts only a short welcome session, after which the participants are left alone with primitive video recordings from ten years ago or dry texts. “No one checks whether the teacher is actually present in the classroom during the entire declared time,” Graf emphasizes. This allows some organizations to earn huge amounts of money with practically zero costs for the educational process.
According to Graf’s most modest personal estimates, up to 20% of organizations in this sphere work according to illegal or semi-legal schemes. In practice, this percentage may already be reaching 70-80%. For years, they have been misappropriating state support funds on a particularly large scale, after which they disappear without a trace or undergo rebranding. But even toward the majority of “legal” courses, the expert maintains a deep skepticism: they are useless from the point of view of the labor market and do not give the unemployed a real chance at employment.
The results of investigations by NDR and the portal “Frag den Staat” testify to how humiliating this is for the participants themselves. One of the participants in a software developer training program (39 years old) said that during the entire time of the course, he was not even allowed to install specialized software on the training computer. He was forced to simply “sit out the hours,” creating an appearance of learning for reports. Another victim, a 47-year-old specialist, instead of the promised professional qualification, ended up in a primitive training session on resume submission, where he was forced to solve children’s puzzles. “I felt like a guinea pig in some strange social experiment in degradation,” he recalls. At the same time, dropping such a course means taking a risk: early termination of training without ironclad medical grounds is often punished by sanctions from the job center, including deprivation of benefits.
Our third interlocutor, 45 years old, told how, at a lecture on resume improvement, a teacher—hearing that he had done an internship at the office of the Volkswagen company—declared in front of everyone: “Well, why didn’t they hire you there for a job if you’re such a great professional according to your resume.” This already says a lot about the level of her competence.
Reasons for Uncontrolled Market Growth
The boom in dubious educational centers was largely provoked by the coronavirus pandemic. And this problem is observed nowadays all over the world. But if in other countries, dubious courses, schools, and academies—especially in the online environment—earn from naive applicants out of their own pockets, in Germany, a real paradise was created for scammers whom the professional environment calls “info-gypsies.”
Until 2020, providers required physical classrooms, equipment, and staff teachers in every city of presence, which served as a natural limiter to chaotic expansion. However, the legalization of distance learning removed all barriers. Today, some companies create entire “educational conveyors” where thousands of people from all over the country study in a single digital space with minimal costs for the business owner.
An additional catalyst was the Qualification Opportunities Act, which expanded the circle of persons entitled to free training to include even employed citizens whose professions might disappear in the future. This made the market an even more desirable piece for scammers. Today, about 75% of all educational service providers in Germany exist solely at the expense of state money, without having a single client who would be ready to pay for their so-called “courses” out of their own pocket.
Systemic Fraud with Vouchers
Karina Knie-Nürnberg, who heads the regional management of the Federal Employment Agency in Berlin and Brandenburg, admits the agency’s helplessness in the face of well-oiled schemes. According to her, if a private certification body has recognized a program as fit, the agency is obliged to finance it. Officials have no legal right of “veto” at the admission stage. In Berlin, the situation has reached a critical point: cases of not just negligence but organized “systemic fraud” have already been recorded, where both the state and the unemployed become victims of professional criminal groups.
The scale of the industry’s criminalization is confirmed by criminal investigations. In September 2025, a large-scale operation took place in Berlin: searches and arrests in dozens of offices on suspicion of group commercial fraud and criminal conspiracy. The accused systematically billed the state for courses and training sessions that either were not conducted at all or existed only on paper. The established damage from just a few episodes amounted to about 891,000 euros, and investigators are certain that this is only a small part of the iceberg in an industry where millions disappear without a trace every year.
Talentspring Academy from Berlin
Despite the depressing general picture, Robert Heike’s story shows that conscientious providers on the market do exist, although searching for them resembles an attempt to find a needle in a haystack. After months of analysis, Heike chose a Berlin company that began work in 2024. He was won over by the lack of aggressive pressure: other firms, after the very first click, literally bombarded his phone with advertising SMS and calls from intrusive managers. “I felt as if I had fallen among street barkers who only needed my consent to write off money from the voucher,” Heike said.
In this company, the approach was different. For Heike, they drew up an individual modular program, excluding everything unnecessary. Teaching was conducted in a live interactive format, which allowed for the immediate clarification of complex points. It is also important that the company accompanied him at the job search stage, helping to adapt documents to the requirements of specific employers. Today, Heike is again working successfully in the marketing of an industrial enterprise. He is convinced that his success is the result of a fortunate coincidence and the correct choice of provider, rather than the merit of the system itself.
Conclusions
The professional retraining industry in Germany today is a vivid illustration of how the good intentions of the state, backed by billion-euro budgets, turn into a breeding ground for corruption in the absence of strict control. On the other hand, any attempts to reform the rotten system immediately collide with harassment from activist-defenders of so-called “freedoms” and populist politicians. These individuals have forgotten that the struggle for equality implies equality of opportunities and does not operate according to the scheme: “Do what you want, and we will support it, even if it violates the law.”
The education voucher system, conceived as a tool for freedom of choice, has in reality become a mechanism for pumping taxpayers’ money into the pockets of dubious dealers with the passive, and sometimes active, help of the aforementioned politicians and activists, whose financial interest still remains to be checked by competent authorities.
Solving the problem requires radical steps. Experts, such as Daniel Graf, insist on the introduction of real control over the content of programs: from a detailed check of curricula to sudden visits by inspectors to classes. Furthermore, it is necessary to create a transparent state system of quality assessment, where every applicant can see the real statistics of the employment of graduates of a specific center. Without these measures, billions of euros will continue to disappear into the “educational jungle,” leaving the unemployed with nothing, and taxpayers with a feeling of grand deception sanctioned by the state.
Latest Posts
