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The new Employment Ordinance has been in force since 1 July. The list of occupations in which people with vocational training qualifications from non-EU countries can access the German labour market is now also in place. Following the "EU Blue Card" for the highly skilled, the improved recognition of foreign vocational qualifications and the relaxations in the rules for students from non-EU countries who wish to stay on to work in Germany, this is a further important step towards making it easier for workers from outside the EU to enter the German labour market and towards covering the skills gap in the German economy via migration.

Taking up a German initiative, the EU SME Envoys Network has drawn up the new European Action Programme for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The European SME Action Programme was presented in Brussels to Elżbieta Bieńkowska, the Commissioner responsible for the internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and SMEs.

The new guideline of the funding programme Integration through Qualification (IQ) for guidance counsellors provides information on the application possibilities of Section 16d of the Residence Act. Various topics are covered in connection with the recognition procedure, such as qualifications to compensate significant differences to the German reference occupation, visa procedures, funding and necessary documents. In addition, IQ has published a "Handout for Professionals" in German and English.

Parlamentary Secretary of State Iris Gleike bestowed the Success In Diversity awards for a more welcoming business culture on 16 June 2015 in Berlin.

More and more people worldwide learn German. This positive trend becomes especially apparent in China (117,000 learners), in India (154,000 learners) and in Brazil (134,000 learners). Thereby, the number of German learners in China has even more than doubled within a period of five years.

The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is funding the "Pilot project for the recruitment of foreign skilled workers for the German craft trades" as a supporting measure to accompany the new Skilled Immigration Act, which comes into force on 1 March 2020.

The Federal Ministry of Education launched the project “Prototyping Transfer – Professional Recognition through a Qualification Analysis” that is aimed to decrease the organizational cost of the qualification analyses, assure their quality and provide the applicants the financial assistance.