How to find a company for an Ausbildung in Germany: where to search and how to apply

The entry point is a company, not a school

German vocational training is dual: most of your time is spent inside the company, the rest at the Berufsschule. The employer is therefore the entry point. Until a company has signed your Ausbildungsvertrag, there is no place, no school and no visa application. And the deal is clear from day one: you are a salaried apprentice paid by the company, not a student paying tuition fees.

Not every company may train, but the chamber does not issue a prior authorisation: it is the company that must meet the BBiG requirements regarding the training site and the trainer. The chamber — IHK for industry and commerce, HWK for the crafts — checks those requirements and only then enters the contract in its register. Without that entry, there is no recognised apprenticeship.

In practice, you are looking for an employer, not a school: trade by trade, region by region, with a contact list you build yourself. Waiting for the perfect advert to appear in a Facebook group is the slowest way to search, and the most exposed to scams.

Where the real places are published

Only a handful of sources produce usable contacts, and all of them are free. arbeitsagentur.de is the first named platform: it supplied 869 contacts out of the first 5,497 we built. Most of the remainder comes from no portal at all, but from company websites opened one by one — which is what makes the Impressum section below decisive.

An expired advert does not disqualify a company: arbeitsagentur.de keeps old listings, and an employer who filled a place in July will most often train again the following year. Write anyway — but never say "in response to your advert of…", because the date gives you away.

The speculative application (Initiativbewerbung) is normal and well regarded in Germany. It only requires an employer in the right field that trains apprentices, not an open vacancy. That is what turns a handful of adverts into several hundred possible recipients.

• arbeitsagentur.de/jobsuche — the official exchange of the Federal Employment Agency. Always open it first.
• IHK-Lehrstellenbörse for industry and commerce; Lehrstellenradar and the HWK chamber websites for the crafts.
• Private portals: ausbildung.de, aubi-plus.de, and regional portals such as ausbildungsatlas.de.
• PDF brochures from chambers, districts and cities listing every training company in one area: search "filetype:pdf Ausbildungsbetriebe" plus the name of the Landkreis.
• The company website itself: an /ausbildung page, or simply the line "Wir bilden aus", is enough to make it a target.

The exact job title decides what your search returns

The official BIBB register lists 324 recognised Ausbildung trades in 2026. A search run with a title that is not on that list returns nothing — or worse, returns offers that will never become a contract a chamber can register.

A concrete example: "Schweißer" (welder) is not an Ausbildung. Welding is a further qualification certified by a Schweißerpass that has to be renewed periodically. The title that actually exists, and that includes welding, is "Fachkraft für Metalltechnik – Konstruktionstechnik".

Another trap: a shortage occupation on the labour market is not automatically an easy training place. Kfz-Mechatroniker is in high demand for jobs, yet the apprenticeship is oversubscribed: roughly 4% of places unfilled against 2,358 applicants left without one.

Our working rule is to target three trades, with three separate employer pools and three cover letters approaching the profile from a different angle. Three genuinely tailored applications beat five stretched ones: every extra trade dilutes the argument and burns through addresses.

The Impressum: why the manager's email is public in Germany

Section 5 of the DDG, which replaced the TMG in May 2024, requires every commercial German website to publish an Impressum containing a valid email address. It is a legal obligation with penalties attached. As a result, a German small or medium company almost always has a real, public email address — often the manager's.

Pages to open, in order of yield: /impressum first (the most reliable, with the name of the Geschäftsführer), then /karriere, /jobs, /ausbildung, /stellenangebote, and finally /team, /ueber-uns, /kontakt. Record the source URL for every address you keep.

Not all addresses are equal. Target ausbildung@ first, then bewerbung@, karriere@, personal@, jobs@. Addresses such as info@ or kontakt@ go through a switchboard and get lost. Note that ausbildung@ is the apprenticeship department's inbox — for a qualified job it is the wrong counter.

Never guess an address in the [email protected] format. An invented address bounces, repeated bounces get your sending account suspended, and your next applications stop arriving anywhere. An unverified address is discarded, not tried.

What an application that survives the first sort looks like

The German file has an expected shape: Deckblatt (cover sheet), Anschreiben (cover letter), Lebenslauf (CV), then the Anlagen (certificates with sworn translations). It goes out as a single PDF, with the CV as a separate file when an online recruitment form is involved.

The Anschreiben fits on one page. So does the CV. When content no longer fits, you remove the weakest item — never the font size or the line spacing: an unreadable document is worse than an incomplete one.

File size matters more than people think. Above 5 MB, some German mail gateways reject the attachment and the application never arrives. Aim well below that, but without compressing scans so hard that a diploma becomes unreadable: legibility comes before file size.

Say plainly that you are applying from Morocco, offer a video interview, and ask whether staff accommodation (Personalzimmer) is available. Housing is the real obstacle for a remote application, and part of the employers in shortage sectors do provide it.

How many applications, at what pace, for which intake

The main Ausbildung intake falls in August and September. There are also less crowded start dates, notably in February and October, depending on the trade and the Land. Places are filled well before then: searching in the month of the intake means arriving after everything has been handed out.

Be realistic about volume: a contract does not come out of five emails. Our active-search lists run to several hundred employers per candidate, and a list of a few dozen targeted addresses is a floor, not a ceiling.

A client who builds a file with us receives around 20 addresses per target trade, roughly sixty in total, selected from a book of more than 50,000 German employers whose training offer we have verified. We avoid sending two DeinWeg applications to the same employer on the same day.

Your German level decides which doors are open: B1 is the legal minimum required for the Ausbildung visa. The B2 expected in healthcare and in customer-facing trades comes from the schools and the employers, not from visa law. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the only care pathway open below B2 is the Pflegefachassistenz.

Before signing: what the contract must say, and what nobody can guarantee

Check the Ausbildungsvertrag for: the duration, which runs from 1 to 3.5 years depending on the trade (1 to 2 years for an assistant qualification, 3 to 3.5 years for the full trade), the pay set for each training year, the Berufsschule rhythm (weekly classes or blocks of several weeks), and the probation period. Support with the visa is not a standard clause of a German apprenticeship contract: ask for it separately, in writing, in a distinct message or letter.

The legal minimum apprentice pay applies to the first training year: 724 € per month in 2026 (682 € in 2025). It rises in each subsequent training year, and the average measured across all years is around 1,133 € gross. Careful with the blocked-account threshold: in principle, pay of at least 1,048 € gross, that is 822 € net per month, removes the need for a Sperrkonto — two ways of writing the same threshold, and below it only the difference has to be covered. Have the calculation confirmed; the decision belongs to the consulate. And a company asking you to pay for a place is not a training company.

Ask the employer whether they will launch the accelerated procedure under section 81a AufenthG: the company files it, the fee of 411 € is owed by the candidate unless the employer signs a written cost undertaking (Kostenübernahmeerklärung). It usually shortens the wait for an appointment in Rabat to around three weeks — no timeframe is guaranteed, the decision belongs to the German authorities. In Morocco, submission goes through TLScontact without exception, and the national D visa costs 75 €.

The most important point last: nobody can guarantee you a contract or a visa. The employer and the German authorities decide. Our commitment is one of means — the quality of the file, the search, the follow-ups, the monitoring — never one of result. An agency promising otherwise is lying to you.