The German Federal Employment Agency carries out an analysis of shortages of skilled workers twice a year. This analyis is based unpon several indicators, such as the number of unemployment persons in relation to the number of vacancies, duration of vacancies and profession-specific unemployment rates.

Based on this bottleneck analysis, the Federal Employment Agency in cooperation with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs create and update a white list (so called "positive list"). that contains professions with a facilitated access to the German labor market for skilled workers besides the priviledged intra EU-migration

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