Two figures from the same year do not add up: 54,400 apprenticeship places went unfilled in 2025, and 84,400 young people ended their search without one (BIBB, Germany's Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training). The market does not have a volume problem, it has a finding problem. Part of that is decided on your website — at a place that does not exist in many firms: a page of its own about the apprenticeship. Writing „we train apprentices“ underneath the contact details leaves the rest to search engines and chance. This article sets out which details belong on an apprenticeship page, why it has to serve two very different readers at once — the teenagers with a phone in their hand and the parents at the kitchen table in the evening —, how an application without a cover letter and without registration works, and how the yearly cycle is kept up so that last year's start date is not still sitting on the page in July.
Open places, searching teenagers, no match
The training market analysis by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training describes a 2025 market under pressure from both sides. 476,000 new contracts mean 10,300 fewer agreements than in the previous year (BIBB).
Demand rose by 3,700 to around 560,300, up 0.7 percent, while supply fell by 25,300 to around 530,300, a drop of 4.6 %. Company-funded supply alone, excluding the places financed mainly from public budgets, came in 27,000 or 5.0 % lower. And still 54,400 places stayed vacant, admittedly a fall of 21.6 % against the 69,400 unfilled places of 2024. As of the 30 September 2025 cut-off, around 84,400 young people were still looking for a place, the second-highest figure since 2009.
Seen from the company side, the same situation looks like this: roughly one firm in two could not fill all of its apprenticeship places in 2025, and the share of firms with filling problems has risen from 31 percent to 49 percent since 2015 (DIHK training survey 2026, run by the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry). That survey rests on responses from 14,058 companies collected between 11 and 29 May 2026 — a base worth knowing before you pass a figure on. An unfilled place is rarely a question of money. More often it is a question of visibility: the vacancy sits in a job board but not on your own page; it sits on the page but without a start date; it has a start date but no named contact person.
On top of that comes a reader who appears in no job board and still helps decide. An apprenticeship decision is taken at fifteen or sixteen, and it is discussed at home. The teenagers find the page on a phone, often in the evening, often through a search for the occupation plus the town. The parents open the same page later on a bigger screen and ask different questions: how does my child get there? How long is the working day? How much money is left each month? Who in the firm is responsible if something goes wrong? An apprenticeship page that only serves the first group loses in the second round — and the second round happens without the company in the room.
The kitchen table test
The hard facts belong at the top
A shortage of suitable applications remains by far the biggest obstacle to filling places: around two thirds of the firms with filling difficulties name it as a hurdle (DIHK training survey 2026).
And one in four firms offering fewer places than the year before gives exactly that shortage as the reason. „Suitable“ does not only mean „good at maths“ here. It also means the person knows what they are applying for. That fit is not created in the interview, it is created earlier, while reading. A page that describes the working day sorts applicants before the first contact — in both directions, which is the point.
The hard facts therefore belong at the top and not at the end, behind three paragraphs about company philosophy. They answer the questions an application actually founders on, and they answer them in a shape that can be taken in within twenty seconds. A short table or a list with bold labels is enough for that; full sentences are in the way at this spot. What belongs there can be listed completely, and it is the same in every trade.
- The exact job title, worded the way it will later appear in the training contract — not „an apprenticeship in the trades“, but the occupation with its full name
- The start date with month and year, plus the duration in years and the conditions for shortening it
- The training pay per year, either as an amount or with a note on the collective agreement it follows
- The daily and weekly working hours, the usual starting time and the rule for Saturday shifts
- The location of the vocational school, the teaching pattern — block weeks or fixed weekdays — and who pays the travel
- Getting there by bus and train: nearest stop, lines, rough travel time from the surrounding villages
- A contact person with a name, a direct dial number and the hours they can be reached, not an anonymous inbox
- What is possible afterwards: being taken on, further training, specialisations and master craftsman school
Plumbing and heating technician (m/f/d)
Start: 1 August 2027, 3.5 years
Pay Year 1 750 euros, year 2 800 euros
Hours 7:00 to 16:00, Fridays until 13:00
School Hildesheim, block weeks
Travel Bus 4 to Kirchweg stop, 12 min
Contact: Ms Sander, 030 23125 140
Monday to Thursday, 8:00 to 15:00
[Apply without a cover letter] [Book a taster day]Three of these details are left out particularly often, and it is always the same three: pay, working hours and the journey. The reasoning is usually that this can be settled in conversation. That is precisely the mistake, because the conversation only happens if the page has already said enough. A sixteen-year-old applicant without a driving licence decides about the journey before deciding about the occupation. If the page says the stop is twelve minutes away and which line goes there, a whole doubt disappears. If the page says nothing, the application disappears instead.
The rule for pay
One page per occupation
Firms that train in three occupations often have one page with three paragraphs. That is convenient from a maintenance point of view and unhelpful from a search point of view.
Nobody searches for „apprenticeship at company X“; people search for the name of the occupation together with the town. A page covering three occupations at once cannot give the matching answer to any of those searches; it is too blurred for each of them. Three separate pages, each with one job title in the heading, the address and the first paragraph, hit the mark.
The second reason is the life cycle of the page. An occupation is offered this year and not the next, because the place is taken. On a combined page that means editing in the middle of the text; with separate pages one page is unpublished and the others stay untouched. How such a page comes about as a building block is described in the documentation on blocks — the apprenticeship page is no special case there, it is an ordinary subpage with a table, a form and a strip of photos.
Scroll table sideways
| Aspect | One combined page for all occupations | One page per occupation |
|---|---|---|
| Search results | Blurred, because several job titles compete for the same page | One job title in heading, address and body text |
| Hard facts | Pay and hours are not the same across occupations | A table that belongs to exactly this occupation |
| Application form | A field for the desired occupation has to be filled in first | The occupation is fixed and is sent along automatically |
| Place is taken | Delete a paragraph without damaging the rest | Unpublish the page, the others stay up |
| Handing it out on a flyer | One link leads to all occupations at once | One link per occupation, matching the flyer at the school |
Teenagers applying for the wrong occupation is not a fringe phenomenon: one firm in four reports frequent shortcomings in career choice skills (DIHK training survey 2026). An occupation page that really describes the working day from seven to four — what you wear, what you lift, where you stand, who you talk to — works against that problem. It costs a few applications that would otherwise have arrived, and it saves the contract terminations they would have turned into.
/en/apprenticeships/plumbing-heating-technician/
1 Job title and start date
2 Facts table: duration, pay, working hours
3 A day on the job: 7:00, 9:30, 12:00, 15:00
4 Vocational school: place, rhythm, travel costs
5 Getting there: stop, lines, travel time
6 Contact person with photo, name, direct dial
7 Form: name, contact, school leaving, start
8 Taster day: three dates to choose from
9 What parents often ask: six answersWhat has no place on the page
Applying without a cover letter and without an account
An application form for an apprenticeship needs four fields: name, one way to make contact, the school leaving qualification being worked towards and the desired start. Everything else is ballast in the first step.
No user account, no confirmation email with a password, no file upload that fails at the file picker on a phone. That the page has to be usable on a phone is not a matter of style but the basic condition. Which fields are legally sensitive, which retention periods apply and when data has to be deleted is covered in the article on taking applications online.
Four fields on one screen
Name, phone or email, school leaving qualification, desired start date. The fields fit on a phone without scrolling, the keyboard switches to digits for the phone field, and submitting leads to a page that names the next step instead of merely saying thank you.
The taster day as a date field
Instead of an open question about interest there are three dates to choose from, plus a time and a duration. Anyone picking a date has not yet applied and still comes into the workshop. Experience shows that a share of the later contracts grows out of those visits.
A name instead of an inbox
Next to the form stands the person who reads the application: first name, surname, direct dial, hours. Where the enquiry travels inside the firm is settled by routing within the team. Teenagers rarely phone, parents often do.
The obvious objection: without a cover letter every application comes in, including the unsuitable ones. That is true, and it is bearable. Three quarters of the companies that see shortcomings in basic skills are open to apprentices with a difficult start anyway and support them, for instance with extra tuition (DIHK). Anyone bringing that openness needs no pre-sorting by a cover letter that in many cases was not written by the applicant herself. How quickly an incoming enquiry is answered matters more after that than any wording — there is an article on response times for enquiries.
Given the shortage of skilled workers, every unfilled apprenticeship place is one too many.
What parents look for on the page
Parents read an apprenticeship page as a risk assessment. They are not looking for enthusiasm but for reliability: has the firm been around for years? Is there an address with a house number? Is somebody reachable?
Can my child get there without a car? And where will they live if the firm is not in town? That last question is no footnote: almost two thirds of all firms see a need for action on the shortage of affordable housing for apprentices (DIHK training survey 2026). If you can say something about it — a room, a contact, the address of a hostel — it is better said on the page than in the third phone call.
None of these questions appear on a careers page aimed at skilled staff, because they do not arise there. An experienced technician asks about projects and pay; a parent asks about supervision, the journey and prospects. The difference from a general employer presentation is therefore one of substance and not only of tone. Whether the firm comes across as reliable at all is decided alongside it by the page about the business itself — how that works without empty phrases is covered in the article on an about page without buzzwords.
The third parental question is: and afterwards? There is a solid answer to that. Despite the current economic crisis, around two thirds of firms take on all of their graduating apprentices, and 84 percent of companies want to support them in further qualifications (DIHK training survey 2026). Whatever of that holds in your own firm belongs on the page: the practice of the last few years, the further training that actually gets paid for, and the question of whether a master craftsman school or a degree is supported.
Scroll table sideways
| Topic | What the teenagers want to know | What the parents want to know |
|---|---|---|
| Working hours | Do I have to get up early? | When is my child home in the evening? |
| Money | What is left for me each month? | Is that enough for a travel pass and a room? |
| The journey | Can I get there by bus? | What happens when the bus does not run? |
| Vocational school | How many school days a week? | Who pays travel and lodging during block weeks? |
| Support | Who shows me what to do? | Who do we turn to if there are problems? |
| Afterwards | Can I stay on? | How dependable is being taken on? |
Both columns can be answered on the same page without doubling it. The short answers sit in the facts table, the longer ones in a section with six frequent questions at the end. Those six questions are at the same time the part of the page that lasts longest: the start date changes every year, the question about travel cost reimbursement does not. How to phrase such answers clearly without slipping into officialese is described in the article on accessible writing.
The yearly cycle of an apprenticeship page
An apprenticeship page is not a page that is written once and then forgotten. It has a fixed rhythm, and that rhythm is the reason the upkeep should sit in your own house rather than with a service provider and a ticket system.
Four changes a year, ten minutes of work each — sent outside as a request that becomes four waiting periods and four invoices, and in practice the fourth one then never happens.
- Autumn: the place for the summer after next goes online. Start date, pay and the way to apply are settled, the form is open. Anyone handing out flyers at schools points to exactly this page with a short address.
- Winter: the taster day gets its dates. Three days, a time, a duration, a meeting point. An open day, by contrast, is an event with registration and follows a logic of its own.
- Spring: the first contracts are signed. „We are looking“ turns into „one place left“ or „taken for 2027, open for 2028“. That is a sentence, not a project, and it prevents applications into the void.
- Summer: the new apprentices start. This is when the photos are taken and the two or three sentences written that will be on the page next autumn — with written consent, before the first picture is uploaded.
Each of these four steps is one change in the editor: swap the text, change the date, publish or unpublish the page. How that works is set out in the documentation on the editor and pages. What matters is less the tool than the responsibility: there has to be one person in the firm allowed to touch the page without asking anyone first. Otherwise last year's start date is still on the page in July, and every application that fails to arrive because of it has a cause nobody sees.
One calendar entry instead of four good intentions
When the place stays open anyway
The page is there, the facts are stated, the form is open — and nobody comes.
That is no exception: 29 percent of firms offer fewer apprenticeship places than the year before, while only 13 percent expand their offer (DIHK training survey 2026). At the same time, seven out of ten training firms offer just as many places as the previous year or more. The difference rarely lies with the page alone. It lies in what happens outside the page, or fails to.
- The address of the apprenticeship page is on every notice, every vehicle and every advert — short enough to type out, and it leads straight to the occupation page rather than the home page
- A QR code on the flyer leads exactly there and not into a portal that asks you to register first
- Job title and town appear in the heading, the address and the first paragraph, so that local visibility can take hold at all
- The taster day is offered actively rather than waited for: two fixed dates in winter bring more than an open invitation spread over twelve months
- Applications are answered the same day, if need be with two sentences and a time for a call back
- The apprentices you already have talk about the page, because their classmates are next year's applicants
Some firms draw the conclusion and stop training altogether. The most frequent reasons for that are a shortage of suitable applicants at 37 percent and bad experiences with apprentices at 27 percent (DIHK training survey 2026). Both usually begin before the first working day: someone who did not know what was coming leaves again. A page that describes the working day honestly is therefore not marketing but precaution against a contract terminated in the first six months.
Six mistakes that cost applications
- The apprenticeship appears only as a subordinate clause on the careers page, without an address of its own and without the job title in the heading
- The start date is missing or dates from last year, because the page has not been touched since the summer
- Pay, working hours and the journey are missing because they are meant to be „settled in conversation“
- The form demands a cover letter, a CV and certificates as files — on a phone that is the end of the process
- Instead of a person there is an anonymous inbox, and the answer comes after ten days or not at all
- The photos show buildings and machines, but not a single human being at work
The first three mistakes cost visibility, the last three cost trust. The fourth is the most expensive, because it breaks off the application at the very moment it had already been written. The sixth point comes with a condition that has to be settled before publication: anyone recognisable in a photo must have agreed, and for apprentices under eighteen their parents or guardians as well. What to watch out for is set out in the article on photos and consent.
What counts in the end