Reading a German Arbeitszeugnis

When you leave a job in Germany you receive an Arbeitszeugnis: a written reference describing what you did and how well. It goes into every subsequent application, which means the next employer reads it — and reads it fluently, because it is written in a register that has settled into something close to a grading scale. If you are new to the market, this is the document that is hardest to assess and the one most worth understanding.

The performance scale

The sentence to find is the one about Zufriedenheit — satisfaction. Two words do the grading: whether the satisfaction is qualified (voll, vollste), and whether it was constant (stets, jederzeit) or merely general.

1. "stets zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit" — very good.
2. "stets zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit" — good.
3. "zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit" — satisfactory.
4. "zu unserer Zufriedenheit" — adequate, and read as a warning.
5. "insgesamt zu unserer Zufriedenheit" — poor.
6. "bemüht, den Anforderungen gerecht zu werden" — the effort was noted and the result was not. This is the well-known one.

The closing formula

A complete Zeugnis ends by thanking you for your work, regretting your departure, and wishing you well. Those three elements are conventional, and their absence is the loudest thing in the document. A Zeugnis that stops at the performance paragraph, or that thanks you without any regret at all, is read as a signal — which is exactly why it is worth checking your own before it goes into an application.

Conduct, and the order of the names

There is usually a sentence about conduct towards superiors, colleagues and, where relevant, customers. The order is read: superiors before colleagues is standard, and colleagues first is sometimes taken to mean the relationship with management was difficult. A conduct sentence that mentions only colleagues and omits superiors entirely is the same signal, more plainly.

Your own Zeugnis

• Read it against the scale above before you attach it to anything. Most people never do, and then wonder why an application stalls.
• Check the factual parts too: dates, job title, and whether the listed tasks actually cover what you did.
• A qualifiziertes Zeugnis assesses performance and conduct; a einfaches Zeugnis only confirms the role and the dates. Applications expect the qualified one.
• If the wording concerns you, that is a conversation to have with the employer who issued it — and, if it goes further than that, with someone qualified to advise. Nothing on this page is legal advice.