Which apprenticeships in Germany have the most open listings? I counted 192,106 Ausbildung offers by trade

Germany's apprenticeship system (Ausbildung) is one of the country's biggest pipelines into work. The Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) runs the largest public index of open apprenticeship places, the Jobsuche. The web interface lets you search one keyword and one place at a time. It does not show you how the trades compare.

So on 7 November 2026 I ran the same search for 19 common apprenticeship titles across all of Germany and wrote down how many listings each one matched.

Disclosure: I built the tool used here, German Apprenticeships (Ausbildung) Search on Apify. It queries the agency's public Jobsuche index. Method and limits are at the end.

The headline number

With no keyword, filtered to apprenticeships (not dual study programmes), the index held 192,106 listings for all of Germany. That is the size of the pool on a single day in November, after most training years have already started in August or September. Companies keep advertising places for the next intake well before it begins.

Listings by trade

Plus, for comparison, dual study programmes (duales Studium) matching "Informatik": 3,257.

I left two broad retail searches out of the table: "Kaufmann im Einzelhandel" matched 36,415 listings and "Verkäufer" 31,004. Those terms are so generic that the keyword search clearly pulls in many neighbouring offers, so the numbers are not comparable with the specific trades above.

What stands out

1. The energy transition is an apprenticeship story

Electronics technicians, HVAC/plumbing mechanics and roofers are the trades that install heat pumps, solar panels, wall boxes and building wiring. Together they matched 12,133 listings, about 3.7 times the 3,305 for Fachinformatiker. If you read "skills shortage" in German news, this is a large part of what it means in practice: there are more advertised places for the people who wire and plumb the energy transition than for the people who write the software.

2. IT apprenticeships lean towards infrastructure, not coding

The Fachinformatiker apprenticeship has two main specialisations. Searching each one separately:

Systems integration matched twice as many listings as application development. The two together (3,238) almost add up to the 3,305 for the plain search term, which is a nice sanity check that the keyword search behaves sensibly for specific titles.

3. Dual study is a real alternative for IT

3,257 dual study listings mention Informatik, almost as many as all Fachinformatiker apprenticeships. For school leavers interested in software, a combined degree and company placement is about as available as the classic apprenticeship.

4. Creative trades are scarce

Media designers matched only 263 listings in the whole country, fewer than a twelfth of the IT apprenticeships. Hairdressers matched 681. If you advise school leavers, these are the trades where an application has to stand out.

How to pull this data yourself

Each search is one HTTP call. This returns the first 20 apprenticeship offers for IT specialists within 25 km of Munich, as JSON:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fast_data_asap~german-apprenticeships-ausbildung/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"was": "Fachinformatiker", "wo": "München", "umkreis": 25, "type": "ausbildung", "maxResults": 20}' 

Each row is one offer with the title, employer, place, start date and a link to the listing. With includeDetails: true you also get the description text and the required school certificate. Useful filters are startFrom / startUntil (for example 2027 for next year's intake), employerContains and publishedWithinDays.

To reproduce the counts above cheaply, I set maxResults to 1 and read the total from the run's status message ("Done: 1 offers (of 7744 matching in the Jobsuche index)"):

import re, httpx API = "https://api.apify.com/v2" TOKEN = "YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" TRADES = ["Elektroniker", "Fachinformatiker", "Anlagenmechaniker", "Dachdecker"] for trade in TRADES: run = httpx.post( f"{API}/acts/fast_data_asap~german-apprenticeships-ausbildung/run-sync", params={"token": TOKEN}, json={"was": trade, "wo": "", "type": "ausbildung", "maxResults": 1}, timeout=180, ) last = httpx.get( f"{API}/acts/fast_data_asap~german-apprenticeships-ausbildung/runs", params={"token": TOKEN, "desc": 1, "limit": 1}, ).json()["data"]["items"][0] msg = httpx.get(f"{API}/actor-runs/{last['id']}", params={"token": TOKEN}).json()["data"]["statusMessage"] print(trade, re.search(r"of (\d+)", msg).group(1)) 

Run it weekly and you have a time series of how demand for each trade moves through the year. The tool costs $0.001 per offer returned. The whole snapshot for this article, about 25 searches, cost well under one cent.

Who this is useful for

• Career advisers and schools: compare trades and regions before recommending where to apply.
• Training companies: see how many competing offers exist for your trade before you set your recruiting budget.
• Job boards and apps for school leavers: a structured feed of apprenticeship offers instead of scraping a search page.
• Researchers and journalists: a repeatable way to track where the skills shortage really is.

Method and limits

• Source: the Federal Employment Agency's public Jobsuche index, queried on 7 November 2026, all of Germany, offer type "Ausbildung" unless noted.
• The numbers are listings that match a keyword, not training places. One listing can offer several places, and some companies post the same place more than once.
• Keyword matching is not exact. Specific titles behave well (the two Fachinformatiker specialisations add up to the total), while generic words like "Verkäufer" match far too broadly. I excluded those from the comparison.
• Search terms overlap: "Mechatroniker" also matches Kfz-Mechatroniker offers.
• It is a one-day snapshot. Listing counts change with the training year.

Data: Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Jobsuche, fetched 7 November 2026.