Country pillars
The ESI measures countries’ “distance to the ideal” performance. This ideal performance is chosen as the highest achieved by any country over a period of 7 years. The ideal performance is scaled to be 100 and the scores of all countries are then computed and compared to that. Basis of the ESI are 15 individual indicators from various international datasets. The scores are calculated across countries at the indicators’ level. The scores are then averaged at the various layers and finally the Index score is formed. To illustrate, an Index (or pillar, sub-pillar etc.) score of 65 suggests that the country has reached 65% of the ideal performance. Thus, there is still 35% (100-65) room for improvement. A score of 100 corresponds to achieving the ‘frontier’, that is an aspirational target performance for that indicator. A score of 0 corresponds to a lowest-case performance. This page shows specific information on the scores achieved by the chosen country across pillars, sub-pillars and indicators. Below, you can find a short commentary on country’s skills system performance over time and the ESI 2024 scores.
Germany: 2024 scores and progress over time
Germany ranked 16th of 31 countries in the European Skills Index in 2024, with a total score of 59.9. At the pillar level, it ranked 15th in Skills Development (score: 54.6), 11th in Skills Activation (score: 65.6) and 16th in Skills Matching (score: 60.4).
The highest-ranking indicators of Germany, in comparison with other countries, are Pre-primary pupil-to-teacher ratio (9, rank 3rd) and Recent graduates in employment (92.2%, rank 3rd). On the other hand, its weakest indicators are Early leavers from training (5.4%, rank 25th) and Recent training (8.1%, rank 25th).
Over the last seven years the overall rank of Germany has decreased from 11th place in 2017, a drop of 5 places. In that time, its overall score has increased from 54.5 to 59.9. The indicators that have improved the most (in terms of their normalised scores, and accounting for indicator directions) are Underemployed part-time workers (3.7% in 2017 to 1.2% in 2024), and Long-term unemployment (2% in 2017 to 1% in 2024). The indicators that have shown the greatest declines are Reading, maths & science scores (aged 15) (508.1 in 2017 to 482.3 in 2024), and Upper secondary attainment (and above) (80.2% in 2017 to 77% in 2024).
Note that these figures may refer to imputed data points.