The Academy for Climate Jobs

Matching Migrant Talent to the Skilled Labour Crisis

Situation

By 2030, Germany will be short 220.000 skilled workers to deploy the infrastructure that will slow down climate change: heat pumps, photovoltaic and solar systems, wind turbines, fast chargers, high-voltage power lines, storage. The legacy “Ausbildung” system has proven to be ineffective at meeting this challenge: enrolment numbers have been in steady decline for over two decades. Those who come to Germany, eager to work and often bringing vast experience in the trades, find it nearly impossible to join this schooling system, which has been left virtually unchanged since the sixties. The same is true for FLINTAs: Ausbildung has failed to make both education and workplaces accessible or attractive for them, with the field being overwhelmingly dominated by cis-males.

Task

After months of validation work along every aspect of the value chain, we decided that operating in the education space would yield the most lasting impact. We set out to prove that a sufficient number of skilled talent is already in Germany and motivated to work in climate jobs. Our leading hypothesis: we can attract and retain this audience to a novel training and apprenticeship programme if we radically design against their needs. On top, we set ourselves the goal of becoming IHK certified and to place graduates into employment. Lastly, this was not to be a charity but a self-sustaining social enterprise.

Action

We inserted ourselves into migrant communities across Germany to understand what is holding them back from gaining employment in the trades. And we systematically challenged every aspect of how the current training- and apprenticeship framework works. After countless hours of interviews, heated debate with gatekeepers and several pivots, we pitched our hopes on the riskiest and most radical approach: designing a brand new training programme, based on the syllabus of the legacy course “Elektrotechniker für Energie- und Gebäudetechniker.” This was based on our understanding that it is electricians that we lack most desperately - and that we will need to build a “Trojan horse” to overcome regulatory hurdles.

Result

We incorporated The Academy for Climate Jobs and launched our first programme, called Elektrofachkraft für Erneuerbare Energie. By designing a full time, bootcamp style course, we shrunk down teaching time to 8 months, with 40% of training happening remotely. Every week, students received not only technical training, but also German language courses for trades workplaces and intercultural workshops. We garnered over 200 signups within 2 weeks of going live, eventually running a full first cohort with 10 participants in summer 2024. By fall, we had receiced IHK certification.

The Academy for Climate Jobs received multiple awards and grants, including from the Federal Ministry for Education and Science, allowing us to bootstrap. Eventually, Lichtblick founder, Wilfried Gillrath joined as sole angel investor, allowing us to hire a full time team. In summer 2025, we signed our first B2B client, a multinational clean energy utility.

I stepped away from my roles as co-founder and managing director in the Fall of 2025 and handed over to my co-founder Anna.