Selling Care Skills? The Multiple Meanings of Training for Polish Live‐In Care Workers in Germany

Migrant care workers from Central and Eastern Europe are essential to Germany’s senior care system, yet their work remains undervalued and poorly regulated. While brokerage agencies often frame live‐in care as a “win‐win solution,” it is characterized by challenging physical and emotional labor, precarious working conditions, low pay, legal ambiguity, and long working hours. Over the past 15 years, the sector has shifted from informal arrangements to a formalized market increasingly dominated by transnational brokerage agencies. These agencies not only recruit and place workers in households, but also offer services such as consulting, lobbying, and increasingly education through specialized training programs for live‐ins, presenting themselves as drivers of professionalization and formalization. However, there are no legally defined qualifications for live‐in carers. To appeal to clients, agencies depict Polish caregivers both as “naturally skilled” due to gendered, ethnicized, and age‐related attributes and as “trained and experienced” through internal courses. This article explores the multiple meanings of training by examining its role from the perspective of both agencies and live‐in care workers, based on narrative interviews and fieldwork in Poland and Germany and by adopting an intersectional lens. The article argues that although training has the potential to improve working conditions and care quality, it remains limited by structural inequalities and a lack of regulation. Without broader legal reforms, there is a risk that training will continue to serve more as a marketing strategy for agencies than as a tool for the genuine, fair, and sustainable formalization of the live‐in care sector.