Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. The Vault Guide to the Top German Employers is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting.
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The Vault Guide to the Top German Employers Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. The Vault Guide to the Top German Employers is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting. |
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The Vault Guide to the Top German Employers As Europe?s biggest economy and one of the world?s major political players, Germany has an enormous amount to offer ambitious jobseekers. From Frankfurt, the beating heart of Europe?s financial centre, to the technology and research hub of Stuttgart all the way to the creative hotspot of Berlin, Germany is a country with a great variety of opportunities on offer. Its well-known history of being caught up in, and sometimes at the heart of, the unpredictable process of world politics might lead you to underestimate Germany?s stability and economic clout. A founding member of the European Union, the country has flourished for decades and ranks as one of the largest exporters of goods and products in the world.
Inside the guide are the biggest and best-known companies in Germany ? the ones that are growing, recruiting, and scouting for new talent. These companies span all key sectors, from engineering to the media, from banking to fashion.
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The history of 20th century Europe is marked by two World Wars, a holocaust, numerous genocides and considerable civil unrest, and today?s Germany has been heavily shaped by the history of the continent. The process of reunification that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is far from complete.
The immediate effect of merging the former East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall was to plunge the new state into a deep recession. The former countries had similar economies, reliant on industry and engineering. The East German economy, with lower levels of productivity, was decimated after reunification by policies that included the enforced parity of the two currencies. Such policies left a legacy of high unemployment in the ?new states? which still persists today, reaching 14.7 percent by the latest figures. Meanwhile, West Germany?s economy struggled under the burden of the estimated 1.5 trillion euro costs of reunification. By the early years of the new millennium, with growth still stagnant and unemployment levels at record highs across the country, some critics in both East and West Germany began wondering whether the whole idea of reunification had been such a good one after all.
In this atmosphere, the Social Democrat/Green coalition government led by Gerhard Schr?der pushed through a series of reforms, which deregulated the employment market and slashed benefits. By 2005 however, unemployment in Germany had reached a record high of 12.6 percent, the highest in Europe since the 1930s, and new elections were called.
A ?grand coalition? of the two big parties, the centre right partnership of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and CSU (Christian Social Union), and the Social Democrats, took over after the 2005 elections. Everyone expected the new chancellor, Angela Merkel, to accelerate the reforms of her predecessor and act
like a German version of 1980?s-era Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This would involve her transforming the backwards and old-fashioned Germany into something more like the thrusting, go-ahead Anglo-Saxon economies. However, such reforms did not materialise and gradually it began to appear that the modern, tough and deregulated economies, particularly that of the UK, weren?t quite all they had been cracked up to be, as growth stalled and the extent of the property bubble became clear.
