At six in the morning at BMW's Múnich plant, Moritz Beck begins his shift by tracing an electrical fault in a newly assembled car.
Beck is 23 and earns about €4,400 gross a month as a mechatronics technician, a mechanic trained to work with electronics. DW reports that he joined the company after technical secondary school, without going to university. The work combines mechanical knowledge with diagnosis of electronic systems, skills increasingly central as automotive production shifts towards electric vehicles and digital manufacturing.
The fault is in the left headlamp. Beck traces it to a central electronic component, where he finds broken plastic and a bent metal contact. Once logistics delivers a replacement, he installs it and takes the car on a test drive, checking for aerodynamic noise and vibrations over uneven surfaces.
The plant occupies an unusual urban location: BMW's Múnich site is in the city centre and employs 6,500 people. BMW was founded in 1916 and opened the plant in 1922. It produced more than 170,000 vehicles in 2025; Germany exported 3.2 million cars that year. A trade-data compilation puts Germany's 2025 passenger-car exports at about 3.17 million, compared with 3.18 million in 2024. BMW Group reported a total global workforce of 154,540 employees as of 31 December 2025.
The Múnich site is also being prepared for BMW's next electric-production phase. The company describes the project as a digitally planned “Pure iFACTORY” and says functional checks of new production equipment were completed ahead of the planned start of series production of the fully electric BMW i3 in the second half of 2026.
DW says BMW workers have four-day working weeks and 24 days of paid annual leave. Beck earns more than his university-going friends, but says he works more. He sees their choices as different paths.
Spain has a contrasting skills gap. It has one of Europe's highest shares of university graduates, at 52.5%, while employers lack technical workers. ABC reported the case of Isidora, 21, who completed a higher vocational course in electrotechnical systems and earns €32,000 a year, or €35,000 including supplements. The contrast comes as German marques dominate Murcia's imported used-car trade, according to the regional market report.
Spain also has the EU's highest share of workers entering the labour market with only compulsory secondary education, at 24.5%, according to the supplied figures.
