Studies concerning continual further education and training in Germany that focus on employees, generally agree on the fact that access to further education and training is selective (see Hubert/Wolf 2007; Wilkens/Leber 2003): Socio-demographic as well as employment related aspects such as formal qualification, job position and employment relationship, gender, age or migration background are to be named as some of the main influencing factors for explaining these differences. Our contribution focuses on migration background and participation in further education in Germany. Until now there are only few studies into further education that consider the differentiation between migration groups (see Bilger 2006; Geerdes 2005). The available data referring to further educational training and migration background usually compare persons of a German nationality with those of other nationalities (see Avenarius 2003; BMBF 2006). On the other hand available results show that persons who became naturalised tend to be more successful in terms of formal qualification, job/employment and earning prospects than persons with a non-German nationality (see Salentin/Wilkening 2003). But these naturalised people cannot be detected within the usual differentiation German/not German and therefore results that distinguish only between Germans and non Germans are presumably biased. In this respect it seems to be important to distinguish within the heterogeneous group of people with a migration background. Therefore, we focus on the heterogeneity of migrants and analyse their participation in further education in contrast to Germans without a migration background. We intend to investigate, if there are differences between these groups concerning their participation in further education and – if there are – how these differences can be explained.

Our research is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) (see DIW 2008). Due to an innovative sample design, individual information is available for Germans with and without migration background and for immigrants who migrated to Germany. In addition to annually collected data, yearly changing topical modules complement the wide-ranging aspects of the study. The most recent topic module subject ‘further education and training’ dates back to 2004. Therefore our analysis is focused on cross-sectional analysis of the 2004 data set. Our sample is reduced to persons who are up to 64 years old, since questions concerning further educational training are only answered by persons under the age of 65 within the SOEP. Furthermore we concentrate on people who finished their first educational apprenticeship and who are not yet retired. For analysing the data we are using multivariate methods such as logistic regression analysis. By controlling socio-demographic aspects such as formal qualification and job position we estimate the influence of migration background on participation in further education.

We expect to detect differences between persons with heterogeneous migration backgrounds and their participation in further education. By estimating influences on participation in further education whilst comparing the different migration backgrounds we hypothesise, that those differences are inadequately explained by ‘migration background’. We would rather assume that these differences could be attributed to other socio-demographic aspects than migration background itself.