ITZ Bund: Insight into the German Government’s Tech Hiring Strategy

It’s no secret that technology has become synonymous with innovation for a few decades now. From planning and budgeting business financials to controlling road traffic and human resources, technology is deeply rooted in every aspect of any modern business environment.

One business that has made significant strides in researching cutting-edge technology is ITZ Bund, a Federal Information Technology Center located in Germany. ITZ Bund is the driving force behind the German Federal Government’s IT System, making their employment specifics interesting.

With approximately 4,000 employees spread over 12 different locations, ITZ Bund primarily serves the Federal Administration with 37,800 logical server systems. In addition, there are over 1,000,000 users from administration and business sources.

Diving into the employment specifics of ITZ Bund will highlight where the German Government is hiring its employees from and the difficulty that this employer is facing in finding qualified talent throughout Germany. The data we will be using to make our inferences are provided by Osterus, a software tool that takes hundreds of data points and combines them into usable and insightful statistics.

Let’s start with the education we see in this employment distribution. Just over 62% of employees have a bachelor’s degree with another 28% holding a master’s degree. Only around 5% of employees have just a high school diploma. This tells us that the German Government is looking to hire well educated employees and less people with a traineeship.

Additionally, the information technology, business administration, and software development categories house an abundance of employees with bachelor’s degrees with 60%, 74%, and 64%, respectively. This makes sense given the intellectual demand that working in that particular technology field presents. To be effective in their position, employees would most likely need formal education training that gives them exposure to a wide variety of different technological and business-related topics.

ITZ Bund also hires employees with a variety of different educational backgrounds in terms of field of study, with employees from 89 different universities. The top university attended across all job titles is FernUniversität in Hagen, followed by Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg with 5.2% and 4.6%, respectively.

The higher education distribution also supports a hiring strategy of attracting educated individuals, with most employees having between 5 to 8 years of education, a group totaling to around 40%. The second most represented education duration range is between 3 and 5 years with just over 27%, and coming as third is 8+ years with over 19%. Only as little as 12% of employees have just between 1 and 3 years of higher education.

The educated labor pool that ITZ Bund is hiring from supports the average work experience in job titles. Most categories have above 4 years of experience with the founders and shareholders having the most experience with nearly 24 years. The software development category has over 8 years of experience with C suite, information technology, and operations coming close behind having between 6 and 7 years of experience.

This further supports the case that ITZ Bund prefers experienced and educated candidates. No job title has employees with less than 2 years of experience, indicating they aren’t looking to hire fresh college graduates with no real-life work experience. This is obviously a well established hiring strategy that has been in practice for a long while.

The current employment duration distribution highlights the difficulty in finding and keeping qualified labor. Most employees have only been with the company for 1–3 years with 51% of employees falling in this category. The 3–5, 5–10, 10–15, and 15+ year categories having significantly less with 12%, 16%, 5%, and 5.5%, respectively.

Companies across Germany have struggled to attract the right talent. The recent pandemic altered the mindset of the labor force, with many expecting higher salary, more flexibility, and improved work conditions. This mindset has made it difficult for ITZ Bund to hire needed employees, despite offering competitive benefits. However, from the current employment distribution, we can see that there was a significant hiring effort over the past few years, which accounts for the high numbers of employees in the 1–3 year category.

The previous employment retention distribution gives insight into how long ITZ Bund is able to keep employees in their company. Most employees work between 1 and 3 years with 35% of employees found there. The 3–5 and 5–10 year categories show similar results with 20% and 21%, respectively. The lowest category in this distribution is the 15+ year category with slightly over 4%.

Given the current trends in the labor force, this distribution does make sense. As we mentioned before, it’s very difficult not only to find qualified talent, but to keep them working in your company for more than 3 years. With the recent hiring effort shown in the current employment duration distribution, we would hope that the ITZ Bund is able to shift the previous employment retention distribution to the right. Not only does hiring new employees come with an upfront cost, but most employees aren’t producing significant value until after they’ve been with the company for at least a year.

Showing similar results is the previous employment retention by higher education distribution, this information tells us how long each major job title keeps employees based on their educational background. The software development and general management categories are able to retain the most experienced individuals with 5–8 years of higher education; however, there are practically no employees with over 8 years of experience.

The information technology, business administration, and consulting categories appear to have equal distributions throughout the higher education categories with an average employee retention range between 2–4 years. Although this is a great starting point considering the difficulty of keeping labor, we would like to see the company retain individuals who have higher education for a longer period.

Analyzing this employment and education data gives us valuable insights into the hiring strategy and preferred qualifications of the German Government. This knowledge is crucial whether you are a business that specializes in IT or simply an individual trying to understand what it takes to work at ITZ Bund.

This data is only the beginning of what powerful software tools, like Osterus, can provide. In the near future, we can expect the inferences from employment statistics to expand into the understanding of the quality of life with a certain job position, what you can expect when accepting an employment position, and more.

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