NOW is the right time: Prepare for Germany before it’s too late

Till the time you are done reading this post, you will take one of the following two decisions:

• Either you will completely stop asking people uncommitted questions about how to come to Germany and drop the entire plan.
• Or you will get 100% focused and start preparing for your journey towards this country of opportunities.

The majority of the motivation to write this post is coming from yesterday’s live session that I had with Parth where we were talking discussing if you should study in Germany or in the USA and a part of it from the people who send me really casual and uncommitted messages in the exact same format every single day and then complain why I don’t respond to them: “My name is ABC, I have this much in 10th, this much in 12th, this much in B.Tech. what are my chances to study in Germany?” or “What is the scope of jobs after studying in Germany?” or “You are not responding to my messages. I just want to ask about studying in Germany”. Although we still managed to answer a lot of such questions in the live stream yesterday, we also discussed a lot of other things which can build a clear picture of the studying experiences and settling opportunities in the two countries. I learned some things about the USA that I didn’t know before and Parth learned things that he didn’t know about Germany that well. We live in two different countries and we are experts for those two particular countries. If somebody asks us for a third one e.g. Greece, Italy, Spain or some other country, our opinion wouldn’t have as much weight as it would when you ask us specifically about the USA or Germany. To sum up the whole hour of the live stream yesterday, I can say the following words with absolute confidence:

If you have a lot of money, want to earn a lot of money, go to USA. If you have less money, don’t want to invest too much on your education, but want to have a good life, want to be respected and earn good money, come to Germany. The difference in the median salaries for highly qualified people between the USA and Germany is around 70,000 US Dollars vs 50,000 Euros (58,000 US Dollars). The job opportunities are good in both countries, but in Germany, German proficiency is a plus, but NOT A MUST. I personally always encourage people to learn German and have some added skills in your pocket to show during job interviews or internships. Life is great in both of the countries but Germany is way safer than the USA. I can promise you that you wouldn’t be surprised by somebody pointing a gun at your face in Germany.

Now with the main characteristics out of the way, I really want to focus your attention towards the fact that the USA is brimming with overabundance of people who want to make a living there, who want to settle down there, build a business or any of the other hundred things the potential immigrants want to do in order to settle in the official land of opportunities. The competition is very high, the H1B visa status is highly volatile, the job security and the social security isn’t that great at all. To paint a good picture of how the situation in the USA is right now, I want you to take a look at the following photograph and keep it in the back of your head throughout the rest of the article.

The bees are the people wanting to move to the USA and the beehive just has too many of them flocking towards it to be able to accommodate every single one of them. That’s why only the smartest, the fastest and the strongest ones can settle down and put their portion of honey in the cell. This is a pure reality. Many professionals who are working in the USA for last 10 years are still waiting for their Green cards and meanwhile, some of them start feeling so unlucky as if the lottery system intentionally forgets to take their name every single time. So, everything that they built in that country for the last 10 years could be worthless if they lost their job, aren’t able to find a new one and have to go back to India.

Germany, on the other hand, stands on the completely opposite side of the spectrum and it is also the only other country that I take seriously when people talk about moving abroad other than the USA, UK, Australia and Canada, mainly because of the job opportunities. The simplest way to measure the availability of jobs in a country can be done by checking how many aren’t employed. Following are the unemployment rates for the main countries to which people want to move to:

• Spain = 16.1%
• Italy = 10.9%
• France = 8.9%
• Canada = 5.7%
• Australia = 5.6%
• Austria = 5.2%
• UK = 4.0%
• USA = 3.9%
• Germany = 3.5%

Now with the lowest unemployment rate in all of the developed countries (don’t talk about the Czech Republic. Nobody cares about it) and the highest GDP in entire Europe, Germany is an underdog with massive potential which people aren’t recognizing right now. It only started becoming popular around 2014 when Germany actively and aggressively started to market their tuition free universities in order to attract more international students from developing countries who can study in Germany and then afterwards stay and work there. Germany has also been facing (almost since forever now) a lack of manual and skilled labour, mainly because first, Germans don’t produce enough children that they could replace the workforce of the older generations and secondly because Germany hasn’t been a popular destination for migrants because of the language and cultural differences. Germany’s population growth rate was -0.2% in 2009 until the influx of migrants from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries and now recently after accepting around 1 million refugees from Syria and neighbouring countries, the demographics of Germany experienced a big change.

More than 1 million people who recently came to Germany didn’t just physically come here, but they also brought their culture along with them and as we all know, in Islam, it is really common to have a lot of children and have more than 1 wives who can produce them, the demographics of Germany is slowly changing. Where the birth rate among German women rose from 1.43 children per woman to 1.46. Among foreign women, the birth rate rose from 1.95 to 2.28 from the year 2015 to 2016 which resulted in the spike that you are seeing in the photograph above. Just in Hamburg, 37% of the population has a migrant background now.

Although Germany coloured this whole scenario of accepting refugees with humanitarian paint, it wasn’t purely that. It was a calculated risk that the German politicians took to avoid the social benefits system of Germany from collapsing because, in the recent years, the number of old people in Germany has grown at an insane rate whereas the number of young people who are working didn’t grow as much in comparison to that. That’s why the retirement ages were increased upto 65 and now they are planning to put it to 70 because there just aren’t enough young people to earn money and pay for social contributions for the old people. That’s why they wanted to bring in such a large man force to their country to get monetary benefits from the other EU countries like Hungary, Poland and Austria in billions of Euros because Germany took the majority of people inside and then they wanted to use that money to train these people and put them back in the German workforce. Humanitarian reasons were one of the least concerns of the German politicians.

Even though the population of Germany is rising again, it’s still nowhere close to the vacancy Germany is still experiencing when it comes to highly qualified engineers and manual labour. The children who are born today in Germany will take at least another 20 years to actively come into the German workforce and there is still quite a lot of time for migrants from other countries who want to move to Germany to study, work and settle down afterwards.

Germany’s aggressive marketing campaign has been a success and that can be seen from the fact that the state of Baden-Württermberg has imposed tuition fee on international students, but it is still just 3,000 Euros per year compared to Canada’s 40,000 Canadian Dollars per year and the USA’s 60,000 US Dollars per year. Isn’t that how every marketing campaign work? They offered and marketed their country by saying that they will teach you for free and you can come to this beautiful country, work and settle down and now when the demand has become high enough, they want to make money out of it (even though they are still not making money, but they are losing less money in comparison to the time when they were offering the education for free). I honestly don’t think that any other German state is going to follow it, but if some of them did, I would completely understand because even after the tuition fee of 1500 Euros per semester, they are still heavily subsidising the tuition fee of international students who have never paid taxes in Germany. Paying for the international students from the German taxpayers’ pockets doesn’t sound like a fair decision towards the German people.

But still, education will remain extremely cheap in Germany because it is ingrained in their culture that everybody should have access to good education. This is seen directly from the time of Kindergarten where the state pays for your child to spend time with other children. Schools are also free and so are the universities and not much will change, that I can say with absolute surety. But that shouldn’t give you an excuse to get lazy about actually executing your dream of studying in Germany, because if you don’t do it now, it might already get late and you will face the exact same harsh scrutiny and checks like the students face now when they are going to USA or UK. Even the 18 month period that Germany provides the international students to find work after their studies are done, is one of the longest duration that any developed countries offer. 

Germany has still not become famous as a country lucrative for immigration but THIS IS WHERE you should take the advantage! Invest in Germany when it’s already in its growing stage so that you can reap the benefits afterwards. If you seriously want to come to Germany, you will stop asking superficial, trivial, uncommitted, half-hearted and flippant questions about what to do to come to Germany, how to start your studies and you will actually approach people who know about it and help you start executing your plan of moving to Germany because you just have MAXIMUM 10 MORE YEARS LEFT, before it becomes too late for you and then there will be another beautiful country with insane amounts of opportunities to which it will be very difficult to immigrate to.

Start organising, start preparing, start planning and get serious and if you don’t want to do any of that, then please don’t send me a message asking about job opportunities or your chances to get an admit in Germany.

But if you are 100% focused and serious about changing your life and moving to a different country then stay with me, be a part of my community of highly motivated individuals, attend the live sessions and if you have some concern, just shamelessly write to me! I always appreciate messages which are written with commitment as long as you are completely serious and motivated to take action on the plans that you have in your head and it doesn’t just have to be about Germany! If you are in a dilemma or are struggling with any of your major life decisions and you think you want to share that with me, then, boy, there is nothing stopping you at all! I am just a click away and I will do everything I can to solve your doubts, answer your questions and if I couldn’t do any of the previous two things, I will definitely point you in the right direction where you can start looking for answers!

If you want to tell your friends to stop flying on autopilot through this golden phase of opportunities and encourage them to start taking serious action if they want to come to Germany, don’t forget to share this article with them! I look forward to hearing from you.