Recruiting the competent lobbyist: Career options and employer demands in Germany

Abstract

Germany likely employs Europe's largest national lobby labor force. This article presents a comprehensive study of German lobbyists' workplaces and employer expectations of competencies. It provides insights into emerging requirements for a qualified workforce in a diversified job market. Drawing on multiple sources of statistics, surveys and cases, the first section examines staffing and entry routes for the main employer types -associations, corporations and consultancies. The job market offers a broad range of career options. This includes an emerging set of junior training programs. German employers have devised fully paid apprenticeship models as structured practical learning schemes where rotating workplace assignments alternate with seminar learning. Some employers partner in training alliances. Traineeships are tailor-made and unregulated, but their existence points to a growing employer interest in formally developing a talent base and professionalism. The second section offers a job market snapshot based on 189 advertisements from 2012 to 2014. Job ads can be assumed to be an objective measure of employers' articulated intentions and expectations for a quality pool of applicants. The survey tabulates preferences for experience, academic degrees, knowledge areas, personal, social and method competencies, and specific political expert skills. Results demonstrate a complex interplay of qualifications and requirements. Ads also show great variety and ambiguity, suggesting that lobbying lacks standardized job classifications and a stable common vocabulary. Findings show that organizational settings influence task and competency combinations expressed in job ads. While all employers appear to follow similar recruiting patterns in regard to some qualifications, they also differ. For example, associations and businesses place more emphasis on policy concepts, organizational participation, coordination, administration and direct representation than do consultancies, while the latter stress advisory roles and strategizing. Corporations get less involved in campaign advocacy. Associations focus on members. Consulting firms tend to recruit younger, less experienced staff, and to less often request domain knowledge. Highlighting commonalities and differences, this article may help stimulate discussion on explicating employers' competency-based human capital management and recruiting practices. The results may help develop

The place of political experience in lobbyist careers: Decisive, divergent or diverse?

“…When clustered into types of lobbying careers, these do not parse into a simple straightforward distinction between those with and without political experience. Instead, consistent with the range of functions that scholars argue are central to professional lobbying (Althaus, 2015; Holyoke et al, 2015), we find that professional backgrounds in communications, journalism, industry and associations are what distinguish among the diverse career trajectory of lobbyists. We find evidence of a revolving and sliding door working in combination in the Australian lobbying sector, with individuals combining policy experience with a deepening career in one or other politically adjacent sectors, that is, associative, corporate or communications.…”

“…Experiences in journalism, public relations, interest groups and within corporate Australia, all helped parse out types of lobbying careers. While we do not have direct evidence that employers privilege these specific roles as important when hiring (see more below), the literature on professional development needs amongst lobbyists and the adverts they post suggests they are (Althaus, 2015). We do find differences in the skill sets of in‐house and contract lobbyists (our so‐called divergent proposition), but, again, this is not determined by different levels of political experience.…”

“…These include policy process knowledge, but also communications skills and relationship management (Holyoke et al., 2015). In his analysis of the skills listed in advertisements for lobbying staff in Germany, Althaus (2015, p. 89) finds that prior experience in the ‘political arena’ is mentioned by a third of adverts, but prior experience in ‘lobbying’ and ‘communications/media’ are a close second and third on the list. This general take on lobbying suggests that many will, in fact, have worked in a range of relevant roles well beyond direct government experience: incorporated into Coen and Vannoni's vernacular, we should witness lobbyists walking through ‘multiple’ doors, which eschews the binary opposition between ‘sliding’ or ‘revolving’ doors.…”

Bringing science to practice: Designing an integrated academic education program for public affairs

“…This will help to substantiate the distinction between professional function levels for public affairs as proposed by Harsanyi & Allen (2017). Within national contexts, competence measurement and competence modeling are undertaken outside the U.S. and U.K. for example in Germany (Althaus, 2015) and the Netherlands (De Lange, 2000; Figee, Gosselt, Linders, & De Jong, 2017), where also a more structural collaborative arrangement exists between the national association of public affairs and a university (Timmermans, 2018).…”