Interne ganzheitliche Integrationsberatung (INGA): Organisation und Praxis der Beratung von arbeitsmarktfernen Arbeitslosen im SGB III

Abstract

"Following the Hartz IV reforms, the employment service's efforts focused primarily on people with comparatively good chances of rapid reintegration into the labour market. However, this approach meant that people facing greater obstacles in finding work received less support, a phenomenon also known as 'creaming'. The INGA programme ('Interne ganzheitliche Integrationsberatung') was created under the Third Book of the Social Code (SGB III) to counterbalance this development. With a significantly lower staff-to-client ratio than regular services, INGA provided support to individuals with more complex problems and greater difficulty integrating into the labour market. Additionally, INGA counsellors undergo further training to strengthen their counselling skills. Over ten years after its establishment, INGA's counselling practice was examined in detail for the first time as part of the research project ('BafAlo'). This involved conducting exploratory interviews and group discussions, as well as qualitative surveys among counsellors, counselees and team leaders in three employment agencies. The research also involved observing counselling sessions and group events. This empirical study examines the organisational embedding and implementation of counselling within the INGA framework. Although INGA is an established service within employment agencies, local senior management sometimes regards INGA as a 'capacity reserve' due to the significantly lower staff-to-client ratio. This can result in additional tasks being delegated to INGA teams. Additionally, there is tension with regular job placement services, due to the more favourable INGA staff-to-client ratio and the process of referring counselling cases from regular job placement services to INGA. The workload of INGA specialists and the composition of the group they counsel are largely determined by the allocation practices of regular employment services. This is reflected primarily in the controlling of their advisory work, particularly the advisors' workload and the integration rate achieved. This can be regarded as a crucial task for INGA team leaders. They are responsible for mediating between the various teams and their managers, as well as representing the position of the INGA team within the agency vis-à-vis senior management. This is a task that the interviewed team leaders carry out with varying approaches and focus. Regarding actual counselling practice, four variants of labour market remoteness are identified among INGA clients, alongside the different approaches of the counsellors. The first manifestation of labour market remoteness involves clients who have experienced a prolonged period of professional stability and specialisation, followed by sudden unemployment. In a second group, the employment history of clients has been characterised by professional instability and volatility for many years, resulting in repeated unemployment. A third group comprises younger clients with no training who, after doing odd jobs and unskilled work, are unemployed, possibly for the second or third time. The fourth group comprises younger people who are facing considerable difficulties in re-entering the labour market after taking time out to raise a family. Regardless of their employment history, INGA clients often experience acute life crises, family issues or mental health problems. This means that each case tends to be rather complex. The understanding of counselling held by INGA's specialists strongly reflects the conceptual requirements of INGA. All of the specialists strongly identify with the holistic, individual and intensive nature of counselling work. Specifically, they see INGA's core values as being reflected in a lower staff-to-client ratio, greater time resources, an expanded scope for action and discretion, more pronounced cooperation with other agencies and networks, open-ended case processing and a perspective focused on the individual case and the sustainability of the placement. However, counsellors adopt different approaches to counselling, particularly regarding how directive, integrative and activating they are. These approaches vary significantly depending on the clients and their personal situation and needs. The results of our study can be summarised as follows: INGA is an important service within SGB III, in both conception and practice. In times of rising unemployment, dynamic structural change and pronounced labour market mismatch, many people dependent on SGB III benefits require more intensive support to find employment than can currently be provided by regular employment services. Counselling that devotes more time to individual cases and has a stronger methodological basis is well-suited to providing such support and preventing long-term unemployment. Our study identified areas for improvement, particularly regarding the professional support and guidance provided to counsellors. The INGA team leaders' professional supervision is sometimes too formal, partly due to their dual structural responsibilities, and does not always provide counselling staff with the necessary counselling-related guidance. Similarly, the practice of supervision as a systematic reflection on challenging counselling work is not well established. These findings suggest that team leaders require further training in the professional aspects of counselling, and that additional resources should be made available to provide supervision as needed. At an institutional level, the issue of how to deal with people who are extremely distant from the labour market remains unresolved, especially since INGA must also meet sometimes ambitious integration targets." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Fuchs, P., Feldens, S., Wellmer, S. & Globisch, C. (2026): Interne ganzheitliche Integrationsberatung (INGA): Organisation und Praxis der Beratung von arbeitsmarktfernen Arbeitslosen im SGB III. (IAB-Forschungsbericht 03/2026), Nürnberg, 93 p. DOI:10.48720/IAB.FB.2603