What remains, what will be: An afternoon in the old zinc rolling mill

Recap of the Oberhausen Labor Market Conference 2026: Demographics, Training, AI and the question of how work retains its unifying power between permanence and change.

By Martin Salwiczek · 2026-09-18

The Oberhausen Labor Market Conference 2026 took place on September 16th at the Zentrum Altenberg, in the former halls of a zinc factory that produced until the 1980s and is now a socio-cultural center. A conference title like “What remains, what will be? Profession between permanence and change” finds a place in these brick halls that has already gone through exactly that: an entire world of work that disappeared, and a building that found a new purpose.

Mayor Thorsten Berg opened with figures that immediately fulfill this claim. The IAB expects a decline in the potential labor force of around 470,000 people by 2026 solely due to demographics; by 2040, according to calculations by the Federal Statistical Office, around 13.3 million current working individuals will have reached retirement age. At the same time, in August, 1,121 young people under 25 were registered as unemployed in Oberhausen, with over 2,300 job openings. Berg's point: shortage of skilled workers and youth unemployment are not a contradiction, but two sides of the same matching problem. His conclusion for the city as an employer, with currently around 130 new junior employees planned for 2027, was accordingly: not just to search, but to train yourself.

The keynote was given by sociologist Armin Nassehi, and he began with an anecdote about his son, who as a child explained that his father didn't have to work, as he was a professor. From there, Nassehi developed his thesis: work is the central generator of identity and upward mobility in our society, and this will remain the case, even if young people supposedly have different priorities. What is changing is the attribution: when AI systems are increasingly involved in decisions that were previously clearly attributed to an individual or a team, it becomes harder to see whose achievement actually counts. Nassehi sees this not as a job killer, but as a challenge that organizations, including administrations, are just beginning to deal with. His concluding thought: the satisfaction paradox, according to which people generally assess their own lives more positively than society as a whole, only works as long as work forms this link between the two. If this is lost, it not only affects individuals but also trust in democratic processes as a whole.

The six subsequent impulses translated this into concrete practice. Dorothea Voss from the Institute for Work and Qualification at the University of Duisburg-Essen argued that the principle of occupation remains stable despite everything: Germany still has 328 recognized vocational training occupations, and AI has simply not yet arrived in the fundamental business processes of many companies. Frederik Paul presented the counterpart from the employer's perspective: 54 percent of companies already use AI, and he considers an additional value creation potential of 440 billion euros possible by 2034, while the IAB briefly points to around 100,000 new jobs and 50,000 lost jobs. His pointed statement: Without AI, there is more of a risk of a production problem than an employment problem.

Claudia Hägele contributed the employee perspective and showed how differently compatibility is actually understood: some employees need flexible hours, others fixed ones. For 9 out of 10 companies, family-friendliness is important despite the economic crisis, but it is not yet truly established in many places, often simply due to a lack of staff. Maren Behlau from MAGS showed a double matching gap in the training market: In NRW, around 100,000 new training contracts were recently concluded, while almost 38,000 young people are still looking for a place, and precisely in Oberhausen, there is already an oversupply of applicants again. Leon Paul, as the youth and trainee representative of the city, soberly stated the expectations of his generation rather than whining: security, development, meaning, and a flexibility that does not displace family and health. And Michael Jehn, Head of Citizen Services, Public Order, Personnel and IT of the City of Oberhausen, provided perhaps the most surprising figure of the day: for 458 offered training positions, there were 2,251 applications this year, the highest value in over 15 years, while the city must cope with 384 age-related departures by 2033. His conclusion, repeated three times: Training, training, training.

Was das für uns bedeutet

For SOLANIUS, this was an afternoon where almost every impulse leaned on a point that we know from our own work. What Berg and Behlau describe as a double matching gap in the training market, we see the same in our own coaching for adults, only with a different cause: there are not too few training offers, there are too many that miss what people actually need. This is not purely a youth phenomenon; we encounter it across all age groups. And the mismatch extends beyond training into the labor market itself: many job profiles have long become more generalist than the job advertisements show, with which companies continue to search for classic job titles. Those who do not find themselves in these titles do not even apply or present themselves differently than they actually are, an effect that digital application processes tend to amplify rather than reduce.

The AI question, which is our core business in consulting, appeared in almost every contribution in the same form: not as a job killer, but as a shift in who an achievement is actually attributed to. When an AI provides a suggestion and an employee adopts it, it becomes less clear whose achievement it actually is, with consequences for both responsibility and recognition. This is exactly where human-centered further training comes in: not to focus on technology, but on the question of how a person remains recognizable in what they do with it.

What remains, what will be? What will remain is that change and dealing with it are our constant companions. What will be cannot be predicted, only hoped for: that despite increasing digitalization, more togetherness develops locally, more direct exchange, and thereby a better understanding of each other. The old zinc factory itself is a quiet example of this: from a place where people worked, it has become a place where people meet.