Ausbildung in GermanyHonest, sourced information for students in Nepal

How to actually find a place — and apply for it yourself

On the day this page was written the German employment agency was advertising 165,002 training places. Not one of them requires you to pay an agent. The hard part is not finding vacancies — it is finding an employer willing to take someone who needs a visa.

A working joinery workshop: a table saw, a wall of hand tools and daylight through the windows.
An Ausbildung is learned in a workplace like this one. There were 165,002 places advertised on the day this page was written — the scarce thing is an employer willing to take someone who needs a visa. Photo: Pixabay

Almost everything written about this starts from the assumption that you need somebody to find you a training place. You do not. The databases are public, free, and open from Nepal. What you need is a plan, a lot of applications, and an employer who is willing to deal with a visa.

One word first, because it matters. An Ausbildungsplatz is a training place, and it is neither quite a job nor quite a course. You sign a contract with a German company, you are paid every month while you learn, you spend part of each week in a vocational school, and at the end you hold a qualification the German state recognises. This page says "training place" throughout. Ausbildungsplatz is the word to type into the German search boxes.

Places are not the scarce thing

On 21 August 2026 the Federal Employment Agency's own job board listed 165,002 training places across Germany — 155,530 of them ordinary company training places, the rest dual study programmes. Anyone can search it. There is no login, no fee, and no agent between you and the listing.

So when you are told that training places are scarce and that is why the fee is 16 lakh, the first half of that sentence is not true.

The scarce thing is different, and nobody advertises it: an employer prepared to hire someone who is not yet in Germany. A small company with four staff can fill its vacancy with a local applicant in three weeks. Taking you means paperwork it has never done, a chamber registration, and a wait of months. Most will not. Some will. Your job is to find the ones who will, and there is no shortcut except volume.

You can apply for any Ausbildung — there is no approved list

This is worth stating plainly, because the opposite is constantly implied.

The residence permit for vocational training is § 16a AufenthG, and it names no trades at all. There is no list of approved occupations, no shortage-occupation requirement, and no rule that applicants from Nepal must go into care work or hospitality. What the law asks is that the Federal Employment Agency consents to your particular contract under § 39 — a check on that employer and those terms, not on the trade you chose.

So if you want to train as a joiner, a mechatronics technician, a baker, a warehouse logistics specialist or a hairdresser, the law is not what stands in your way. Anyone who tells you only certain trades are open to Nepalis should be asked where they read that.

Three more things sit in the same short section of the law, and almost nobody is told them:

And there is no minimum school certificate either

The same is true of your schooling, and it surprises people. The Federal Employment Agency states it plainly: "Rechtlich gesehen brauchst du keinen bestimmten Schulabschluss für deine duale Ausbildung." Legally you need no particular school certificate for a dual Ausbildung. Employers decide for themselves what they will ask for — "Die Betriebe dürfen selbst entscheiden, welchen Abschluss die Bewerberinnen und Bewerber mitbringen müssen."

What the embassy in Kathmandu asks you to hand over is your Schulabschlusszeugnis mit den Noten — your school leaving certificate, with the grades on it. It asks for the certificate you have. It names no minimum level, and for this visa it asks for no equivalence assessment: no anabin entry, no Zeugnisbewertung. The skilled-worker employment visa is different and does require one. Do not read across from that.

So Class 10 on its own does not shut the door. Where a German employer states a minimum at all, it is usually a Hauptschulabschluss — nine years of school. The SEE sits at the end of Grade 10.

Three honest limits on that:

None of this is likely to be the thing standing between you and a place. B1 German and an exam date are — and that is a queue, not a certificate.

But some trades are much easier to get into than others

Both halves of this are true and you need both. The law lets you apply for anything. The odds are not the same everywhere.

In 2024 Germany had 69,405 training places that nobody took — 12.8% of everything employers offered. In the crafts (Handwerk) it was worse: around 19,000 unfilled places, 18% of what craft firms advertised. In individual trades it goes higher again. Pipe-laying (Rohrleitungsbauer) left 145 of its 405 places empty, 35.8%.

Two facts from the same report are worth more to you than any list of trades:

So why is there no list of shortage occupations on this page? Two reasons, and they are the reasons this whole site exists.

It would rot. The trades shift every year, and a page that quietly goes out of date is worse than no page — you would plan around a number we stopped checking. And a list is exactly how people get steered. Telling you that your realistic options are care work and hospitality is what an agent does. We are not going to publish a politer version of the same thing.

There is also a trap inside the numbers. Retail (Kauffrau/Kaufmann im Einzelhandel) left 31.8% of its training places unfilled, which looks like an open door — and yet 2,501 people who wanted to train in retail ended that year with nothing. Unfilled and easy are not the same thing. Employers and applicants manage to miss each other inside a single trade.

What to do instead of reading a list. Search the Jobsuche for the trade you actually want, and see how many vacancies are still open late in the season. That is this year's answer rather than last year's, it is free, and you can read it yourself in ten minutes. Then apply widely. If your first choice turns out to be crowded, the construction, metal, food and craft trades are where the empty places have been for years — and a willingness to go somewhere small and unglamorous is worth more than any shortage list.

Where to search, free

Where Who runs it What it is
Jobsuche, Ausbildung tab — arbeitsagentur.de/jobsuche Federal Employment Agency The one to start with. The national vacancy database, with a named employer on every entry. This is where the 165,002 figure comes from.
Lehrstellenradar — lehrstellen-radar.de The crafts chambers A genuinely different pool. Vacancies craft firms report to their own Handwerkskammer, over 130 skilled trades. Not a copy of the agency's database.
ausbildung.de — ausbildung.de Ausbildung.de GmbH, a Bertelsmann company Commercial, and free for you — employers pay to be listed. Around 142,000 places. Overlaps heavily with the agency's board.
azubiyo.de — azubiyo.de FUNKE Works GmbH The same model as above. Worth a look, not worth a week.
BERUFENET — berufenet.arbeitsagentur.de Federal Employment Agency Not vacancies. What each trade actually involves, day to day, before you apply for it.

Every regional chamber — the IHK for commercial and industrial trades, the Handwerkskammer for crafts — also runs its own vacancy exchange for its area. Search for the chamber's name and the city. We are deliberately not printing a single national chamber link here: the address most guides still give (ihk-lehrstellenboerse.de) now redirects to a campaign page with no search on it at all. We checked again on 23 August 2026. It is still dead.

One of these is not what it looks like. The Federal Employment Agency also runs a page called Ausbildungssuche, at web.arbeitsagentur.de/ausbildungssuche, and most guides list it as a place to find vacancies. It is not one. It is a directory of courses and training providers — vocational schools, rehabilitation training centres, publicly funded programmes — and the entries name a Bildungsanbieter, not an employer offering you a contract.

For someone applying from Nepal that distinction decides everything. No employer means no training contract, no contract means no § 39 consent, and no consent means no visa. Search the Jobsuche instead.

The free databases are all in German. That is not an accident of design, and getting through them is the first honest test of whether your German is where you think it is.

Searching more boards is not the lever you think it is. The agency's board and the commercial ones list largely the same employers. What decides your outcome is not how many sites you searched but how many applications you sent, and whether the employer is willing to take on a visa. Two databases and three hundred applications beats six databases and thirty.

Placement by the Federal Employment Agency is free. They have said so in writing. In August 2026 its international division, the ZAV, told us:

Die Vermittlung durch die Bundesagentur für Arbeit ist für Bewerberinnen und Bewerber stets kostenfrei… Keinesfalls sollten Interessierte Geld an private Mittelsmänner zahlen, die mit angeblich garantierten Visa oder Programmplätzen werben.

Placement through the Federal Employment Agency is always free of charge for applicants, and under no circumstances should people pay money to private middlemen advertising supposedly guaranteed visas or programme places.

What a German application contains

German employers expect a specific set of documents, in a specific order. This is the Federal Employment Agency's own list:

  1. Anschreiben — the covering letter. One page.
  2. Deckblatt — a cover sheet. Optional; the agency says plainly it is "kein Pflichtbestandteil".
  3. Lebenslauf — the CV, in the German tabular style. The agency calls it "das Herzstück deiner Bewerbung" — the heart of your application.
  4. Zeugnisse — your school certificates. The agency says the last two, plus anything else relevant, with translations.
  5. Your language certificate, or the date you are booked to sit the exam.

Two things matter more than polish. Write it in German — an application in English, for a German-language training place, answers a question the employer was about to ask, and answers it badly. And say plainly, near the start, that you are applying from Nepal and will need a visa. Hiding it wastes your time and theirs; the ones who would have said yes will still say yes.

The Lebenslauf: what goes in, and what must stay out

A German CV is a tabellarischer Lebenslauf — a table, not an essay. There is a free template you can copy into your own Google Drive, fill in on your phone, and share with your teacher for correction. Dates in a column on the right, facts on the left, most recent first. Two pages at the absolute most, and one is better when you are eighteen.

One short summary at the top is worth having. A Kurzprofil or Profil — two or three factual sentences saying who you are, which trade you want, your German level and when you are free — has become normal in German CVs, and one survey of hiring decision-makers found a majority value it. It is worth most to exactly the person reading this: someone with little work history, whose dates cannot speak for themselves.

What to avoid is the other thing — a paragraph of adjectives about how motivated and hard-working you are, or a block that repeats in sentences what the sections below already say in dates. Facts, not adjectives, and never twice.

What belongs in it

What must not go in — and this is where applications from South Asia usually give themselves away. A CV that looks completely normal in Kathmandu can look wrong in Germany, for a specific legal reason. Under the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, Germany's equal treatment law, an employer is not allowed to select on these grounds, so putting them in your CV asks them to do something unlawful. It reads as though you do not know how things work.

Leave all of this out:

  • Marital status — no ledig, no verheiratet, no "single".
  • Your father's name or occupation. Standard on a Nepali CV. Not on a German one.
  • Religion or caste. Never.
  • Number of children, or anything about your family situation.
  • Health, disability or blood group.
  • Passport, citizenship or ID numbers. Nationality alone is fine and can be useful here, since the employer needs to know a visa is involved — but never the document numbers.
  • Your exact height, weight or a full-length photograph.
  • Percentage marks and class rank from every year of school. Give the qualification and the year. If a grade is genuinely good, say so once.

None of this makes you a weaker candidate. It is simply not what the document is for, and removing it makes room for what is.

The photograph. You will get contradictory advice, so here is the actual position. It is not required — the Federal Employment Agency says "ein Bewerbungsfoto ist zwar keine Pflicht mehr" — and an employer may not demand one. But the same sentence continues: "jedoch in vielen Bränchen weiterhin üblich" — still usual in many industries. So it is your choice, and either choice is normal.

If you include one, it must be a proper photograph: head and shoulders, plain background, ordinary clothes, looking at the camera. Not a selfie, and not your passport photo. Both are specifically warned against, and both are what people send.

A sixty-second video is the thing almost nobody sends, and it answers the employer's real worry. Video applications are still relatively new in Germany and are treated as a supplement rather than a replacement — the Federal Employment Agency has its own guidance on them. For someone applying from Nepal they do a specific job: an employer who has never met you is quietly wondering whether you can really hold a conversation in German. A minute of you saying who you are and why this trade settles it in a way no certificate can.

Record it in German, at whatever level you are actually at. Put it on Google Drive or YouTube as unlisted, and paste the link into your CV. If it is bad, do not send it — no video is much better than a careless one. The template has a line for the link.

The Anschreiben: the letter that decides it

The CV says what you have done. The letter says why this employer, and it is the part almost everybody wastes.

The Federal Employment Agency's advice is blunt: do not send the same letter to everybody. Open with something about that company which shows you looked at it, then explain "warum ich denn diese Ausbildung absolvieren möchte" — why you want this particular training.

A structure that works, four short paragraphs on one page:

  1. Why them. One or two sentences proving you read their website. What they make, where they are, how long they have trained apprentices. Never "Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, I am writing to apply for any available position."
  2. Why this trade. What draws you to it, and anything you have actually done that touches it — helping in a workshop, a family shop, a kitchen, a farm. Concrete beats enthusiastic.
  3. Where your German is. State your level, name the exam and the date, and say what you are doing between now and then. An employer who knows you sit B1 in March can plan around it. One who is left guessing will not.
  4. The visa, in plain words. You are in Nepal, you will need a visa, and there is a faster route their own Ausländerbehörde runs which costs them €411. Offer them the page that explains it. This paragraph is the single most useful thing in the letter, because it turns "complicated" into "a thing with a procedure".

Close with Mit freundlichen Grüßen and your name.

Do not have an AI write it for you in German you cannot read. German employers are already seeing a lot of that, and it collapses at the first phone call, which is exactly the moment you cannot afford it to. Write it yourself and have your teacher correct it. A B1 letter that is plainly yours is worth far more than a C1 letter that is plainly not.

The Anlagen: send one file, not ten

Anlagen means the attachments. Getting this wrong is the commonest way a perfectly good application annoys the person opening it.

Send one PDF. Not ten. Not a folder, not a zip, not eight photographs and a Word file. For an online or email application it is normal in Germany to combine everything into a single PDF, in this order:

  1. Anschreiben — the covering letter
  2. Lebenslauf — the CV
  3. Zeugnisse — your school certificates, most recent first
  4. Language certificate, or the confirmation that you are booked for the exam
  5. Any reference or internship confirmation you actually have

Keep it small. Aim for under 3 MB, and treat 5 MB as the hard ceiling — many company mailboxes reject more, and some application forms will not accept it. If a company states its own limit, that limit wins.

Name the file so a stranger can file it. Bewerbung_Thapa_Bishal.pdf is right. IMG_20260822_final2.pdf is not. Put your surname in it: the person receiving it has forty others.

What does not go in — and this matters

Do not send a copy of your passport. Not with the application. An employer deciding whether to interview you does not need your identity documents, and has no business asking for them at this stage. There is a later point — a signed contract, the visa step — where a passport copy is genuinely required, and that is when it goes.

A passport scan sitting in a stranger's inbox is the single most useful document for anyone committing fraud in your name. Once you have sent it you cannot get it back, and you will never know where it went.

Also leave out, for the same reasons the section above explains:

If an employer or an agent asks for your passport before there is a contract, that is a reasonable moment to ask why, in writing, and to say you will provide it at the visa stage. An honest employer will not mind. What you should pay for, and what you should not.

How to make one PDF on a phone

The mistake is to make several PDFs and then try to join them together. On a phone that is genuinely hard, and the websites that offer to do it want you to upload your personal documents to a stranger's server.

Do it the other way round: put everything into one document first, then export that document once. Your letter and CV are already Google Docs, so the whole application can be assembled inside one of them.

Step by step, on the phone:

  1. Open your Anschreiben — your own copy in your Drive.
  2. Go to the very end of it. Tap +, then Page break.
  3. Open your Lebenslauf, select everything, copy it, come back to the Anschreiben and paste it after that break. Your letter and CV are now one document, in the right order.
  4. Add another Page break, then tap + → Image and insert your certificates, one after another.
  5. Export the whole thing: the ⋮ menu → Share & export → Save As → PDF Document. Then tap the download icon to get it onto your phone.

That is one PDF, in the correct order, made without a printer, without a scanner and without uploading anything to a website you do not know.

Keep the original two documents as they are. Do the joining in a copy, so your Lebenslauf stays a clean separate document you can edit and reuse for the next employer.

Your certificates never change, so photograph them once. Get them into a document of their own, get them looking right, and leave it alone. For every application after the first, joining up the file is a two-minute job: copy the letter, paste the CV under it, paste the certificates under that, export.

If the employer's own form asks for separate files, follow the form. Some online application systems have a slot for the Anschreiben, a slot for the Lebenslauf and a slot for the attachments. When that happens, upload them separately — the one-file rule is for applications you send by email, and the employer's own instructions always win.

Getting a paper certificate into the phone

Your school certificates are on paper, so they have to become pictures before you can put them in the document.

If you have a scanning app, use it — Google Drive, Microsoft Lens, Adobe Scan and the iPhone Files app all have one. They straighten the page, sharpen the text and remove the shadow of your hand. Where the app offers to share the result as an image rather than a PDF, choose the image, because that is what you can insert into the document.

If you do not, a careful photograph is fine. Careless ones are the problem, not photographs. So:

Then check the size. Photographs are heavy and a PDF full of them can easily pass 5 MB. If yours does, retake the pictures with a lower camera quality setting, or scan in black and white. A certificate has to be readable, not beautiful.

If you can get to a computer — at an institute, a library, a friend's house — open your document in a browser and use File → Download → PDF Document. It is the same result and slightly less fiddly.

Work backwards from the exam, not forwards from today

This is where most plans break. The training year normally starts in August or September. The Federal Employment Agency tells German school leavers to start looking "eineinhalb Jahre vor Beginn der Ausbildung" — eighteen months ahead. Chambers advise employers to recruit roughly six to eight months ahead, and to allow four to six months between signing a contract and the trainee actually arriving.

Missing September does not cost you a year. This is worth being clear about, because the fear of it pushes people into bad decisions. German chamber guidance is explicit that "grundsätzlich kann zu jedem Tag im Jahr eine Ausbildung begonnen werden" — in principle an Ausbildung can begin on any day of the year. What a late start changes is which examination sitting you land in: begin by 1 October and you can still sit the summer final exam after three years; begin later and you are scheduled for the winter sitting instead, which pushes your finish date by a few months rather than a year. The other real cost is vocational school, which runs on an annual cycle, so a late starter joins a class already under way and has ground to make up.

So it is a reason to move quickly, not a reason to give up on the year — and it is a reason to talk to your employer early, because the start date can be moved by agreement and the contract cannot be backdated.

Those are the timescales for someone who is already in Germany, already speaks German, and does not need a visa.

Now add the two things that are specific to Nepal. Your B1 certificate must be in hand when you apply for the visa, not later — and the exam queue in Kathmandu is measured in months, not weeks. Then the visa itself.

So the sequence that works is: exam date first, then applications, then contract, then visa. People who apply for places before they have any route to a certificate are the ones who end up with a signed contract and no visa.

  1. 1Get an exam date, and sit itThe queue in Kathmandu is months, not weeks. Everything else waits on this.
  2. 2Apply for places — in German, in volumeCertificate in hand, or a confirmed exam date you can name in the letter.
  3. 3Sign the contract — conditional on the visaAsk for that clause before you sign. It cannot be added afterwards.
  4. 4Your employer starts the §81a procedureOnly they can. It costs them €411 and it skips the waiting list.
  5. 5The training year beginsUsually August or September — but a later start is possible, and it is worth knowing that before you panic.
Work backwards from step 5, not forwards from today. The commonest and most expensive mistake is doing step 2 before step 1.

How to tell whether an employer will really sponsor you

Not in your first email. These are not screening questions to put to a company that has never heard of you — an application that opens with a list of demands about visa procedure gets deleted. Wait until somebody has written back, or invited you to talk. Once a company has shown real interest, these become reasonable and even welcome, because they are the questions the employer is about to have to answer anyway.

An employer who will not answer these once they are interested is not necessarily dishonest. But they are telling you they have not thought about the visa, and that is the part that will decide whether you actually go.

If someone offers to do all this for a fee

They are offering to do what is on this page. Search a free database, write a letter, and send an email. That is worth something — but it is worth what a week of skilled work is worth, itemised, not seven to sixteen lakh. What you should pay, and what you should not.

On the § 81a procedure, be precise about what can and cannot be sold. Nobody can file it for you in your own name: the law lets the employer apply, "in Vollmacht des Ausländers" — on your authority, not instead of it. But the same paragraph then says "Arbeitgeber können zur Durchführung des Verfahrens Dritte bevollmächtigen" — employers may appoint a third party to run the procedure for them.

So a service that handles § 81a is lawful and can be genuinely useful. Two things follow, and they are the whole point. The employer appoints it, not you — if someone in Kathmandu offers to run § 81a on your behalf, they are describing something the law does not provide. And under § 296a SGB III the employer pays for it. A fee for arranging an Ausbildung may be taken from the employer and from nobody else.