Porsche AG and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, predicting record sales for their luxury German cars this year, are vying to find enough wunderkinder to make them.
An aging workforce and declining enrollment in technical studies caused the shortfall of available engineers in their home country to rise to an all-time high of about 77,000 last month, according to the VDI German engineering association.
BMW aims to hire 800 people at its factory in Leipzig, as part of an expansion for the production of the i3 electric city car and the i8 hybrid super car. Porsche is recruiting more than 1,000 workers for its plant about 11 miles away, where it plans to add the new Cajun compact sport utility vehicle.
“Until about two years ago, we had hardly heard of companies in the region struggling to find skilled staff,” Leipzig Mayor Burkhard Jung said.
The shortage may threaten the competitiveness of BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG as they expand with electric vehicles. A third of Germany’s large companies now consider the skilled-worker shortage as a business risk.
