Since the end of last year, scientists may use official statistics data on continuing vocational training at enterprises for their own analyses. In a joint project, the Federation's and the federal states' statistical offices anonymised those basic data of the Second European Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS 2) in 2000 for 1999 as the reference year to make them meet the strict confidentiality requirements stipulated by law, on the one hand, ensuring that these data were still offering sufficient potential for scientific analysis, on the other hand.
This data set, which is referred to as "scientific use file", containing data on some 3200 German enterprises, has been compiled at short notice in reply to a request recently expressed by scientists, who wished to get access to data on continuing vocational training. The efforts to compile scientific use files, such as e.g. data of the Microcensus, the Income and Consumption Sample Survey and the Time Budget Survey, are supported by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research in the context of its own efforts to improve the informational infrastructure between science and statistics in Germany. The scientific use file on CVTS 2 finds its first application in what is called a competition of expertise, initiated and already launched by the Council for Social and Economic Data on the subject of "Education in Working Life".