Creative countermeasures

How the Marzahn-based family business LKM is tackling the search for skilled workers

“Retirement looms,” says Kai Hessel. Almost one third of the workforce of LKM, a Berlin Marzahn-based family business, will enter retirement sooner or later and take its experience and knowledge with them. “It’s quite hard to accept.” says the senior manager Gerd Hessel. The business-owning family is now fighting back with all its strength and, above all, ingenuity.

It wasn’t long ago, and Hamse Solgi was repairing oil pipelines in Iran, both above ground and underwater. A dangerous and unhealthy line of work. He fled his country and arrived in southern Germany before finally coming to Berlin. Here, he found work at LKM GmbH Berlin, a company based on Boxberger Strasse that uses laser cutting to process plastic and metal. In fact, the company is a group of companies, in which the entire family implements their entrepreneurial ideas—from manufacturing a transport box for cargo bikes to the metal cutting of large components. “Very few people in Germany are able to do this,” says Kai, the younger Hessel, who is head of Hessel Metall+Kunststoff GmbH.

LKM is a service provider for sheet metal processing and laser technology and manufactures products tailored to customer specifications. What unites the companies is that they all need well-trained skilled workers with highly specialised know-how. And these are becoming increasingly scarce, as Gerd Hessel knows. It takes two years of onboarding and training for new employees to make them fit for the tasks at hand. Since ‘retirement looms’ for one third of their workforce, the Hessels have long since pulled all the stops to tackle the ‘skilled workers shortage’ problem in creative ways.

After taking many detours and overcoming numerous geographical and bureaucratic obstacles, Hame Solgi is one of four new employees, who came from Syria, Ukraine, Tunisia, and Iran and found a new professional home here. “Nationality is secondary to us,” says Hessel senior. He also says that working together with the employment agency yielded ‘good results’. However, the Hessels don’t want to rely on this alone and are keeping their feelers out in all directions for new staff and apprentices, including schools, universities, and, above all, social networks. This is mainly due to past successes. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and similar services are not only used constantly, they also facilitate direct and personal access to that coveted group called ‘young talent’.

But both Gerd and Kai Hessel know how hard it can be to make their line of work—metal and plastics processing—seem ‘sexy’ in the eyes of their target group. In an age where ideals are shaped by influencers and models, running a three-shift operation and performing manual labour are a hard sell. And so, it is not rare that a third of the high school students at career information events are “playing video games on their phones.” “We will have to respond more specifically to the demands of high school students. Questions like ‘What do I earn during and after my apprenticeship?’ or ‘What is the everyday work like?’ in fact interest young people. What’s more, we as employers have to make us more interesting and have a story to tell. We as a company have to advertise ourselves at schools.”

They have started a project with the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, among others. The idea was to work together on the development and design of new products and the response has been positive. “However, we’re still at the very beginning,” says Gerd Hessel, whose second son, Sven, initiated the collaboration. To be successful, it is necessary to address precisely those people who are interested in the company’s field of work, or already work in it. “We want to show what’s possible,” says Hessel.

Rico Bigelmann for POTENZIAL

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