Frances Vu-To is training as a multimedia electronics technician. She installs televisions, home cinemas, smartphones and much more besides. | Photo: Gabi Vogt / 13Photo

“Vocational education has held its own as the principal training choice in Switzerland for the last 20 years”, says Jürg Schweri, a professor at the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training (SFUVET) in Zollikofen. In his view, it continues to occupy a central place in the Swiss upper-secondary education landscape: two thirds of young people take up places in one of more than 200 federal skills (CFC/EFZ) or vocational training (AFP/EBA) programmes once they’ve finished compulsory education. This is a European record, with the OECD average only at 12 percent. We present here an overview of the drivers, both past and present, of the success of dual apprenticeship. 

A patented method against unemployment

“The major advantage of early vocational training for companies and the economy is that it provides needs-based training to people”, says Schweri. “The matchmaking aspect is the main driver of our training system”, says Rami Mouad, a statistician at SRED, the cantonal education research service in Geneva. “Companies are involved in creating training. The apprenticeship market lines up pretty well with the needs of companies in terms of vocational qualifications”.

Mouad sees vocational training as not only giving young people qualifications but also helping them integrate into the labour market. This is reflected in the unemployment rate which is lower than elsewhere in Europe: 6.9 percent among people aged 15-24 years, compared to 13.6 percent on average. 

Vocational training therefore appears to be a panacea, ensuring professional integration for young people. This is confirmed by Schweri: “The low rate of unemployment is a mark of the system’s quality”. He will continue to monitor this parameter in his upcoming study on the role of training companies in the transition of apprentices to higher education and employment. In particular, he’ll be looking at the success of those transitions, i.e., if graduating apprentices quickly find work or if they fall into unemployment. 

Jean-Louis Berger is a doctor in education sciences at the University of Fribourg, and he hopes nevertheless to go beyond this economic argument and add a twist of educational psychology. In his view, the performance of Switzerland’s early vocational training system can’t be solely based on economic indicators such as youth unemployment rates. “To develop training quality, it’s essential to pay attention also to how it is defined and perceived by stakeholders, i.e., apprentices, educators and in-house trainers”. In 2022, Berger developed a tool to allow apprentices to express their feelings in relation to the quality of their training. “The idea was for this information to be used by trainers to improve their teaching and practices”. 

Always sometimes exploited

As part of this study, Matilde Wenger, a doctoral student working today at the SFUVET in Lausanne, wrote her thesis on the tension in roles asked of youths in training. She wanted to know about 15-year-olds joining the labour market after spending time in a relatively strict, in some ways “infantilising” school setting. She says her work showed that there are still too many cases of apprentices being exploited to carry out tasks that don’t require a young trainee.

These situations lead to frustration, she says, and potentially even the termination of the apprenticeship contract. “At school, the more they’re treated like children, the less they pay attention. At work, the more they’re required to carry out ungratifying tasks, the less they feel invested”. Wegner thinks this could be solved if the actors involved in training recognise the existence of these kinds of tensions and verbalise them.  

Today’s system is therefore generally satisfactory. But, if we live in a world that is constantly changing, shouldn’t vocational training also be able to adapt? For Schweri, there is a sort of ‘continuous adaptation’, as vocational training is tightly tied to the labour market. “If there is a big change in the market, training is the first thing that has to change”. Lorenzo Bonoli, a researcher at the SFUVET, recalls that in order to facilitate adaptation to social change, Swiss legislation provides for all training to be audited and potentially reviewed every five years. 

Mouad gives a concrete example: “The development of the AFP/EBA shows an adaptation of vocational training to the school population in vulnerable situations. Some authors qualify the AFP/EBA as inclusive vocational training, because it also welcomes students who have already received specialised teaching and specialised learning”. 

The legislation also provides the possibility for CFC/EFZ holders to continue their studies up to the level of a college of higher education, while those with a so-called specialised baccalaureate can go to a university of applied sciences. According to Bonoli, “on the one hand this responds to the need to improve the creativity of early vocational training, and on the other ensures there are more youths entering into tertiary level qualifications”. The permeability between the early vocational and tertiary levels of training has only improved since the 1990s.

The various training sectors are particularly well interconnected. The AFP/EBA allows for extending into the CFC/EFZ; the vocational baccalaureate, which can be taken alongside or after the CFC/EFZ, leads to tertiary level training within universities of applied sciences (HES/FH), but can even qualify students for the traditional universities if they also take a bridging programme. Furthermore, “between 1999 and 2019, we have observed that the proportion of the workforce with early vocational training as their highest qualification has pulled back from 52 to 36 percent, showing that it’s becoming more of a trampoline and less of a finish line”, says Schweri. He hopes from here on to be able to shed fresh light on the transitions to the vocational baccalaureate, HES/FH and higher vocational training.  

Schweri concludes by saying, “we have a very good system, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better”. His view is clear: mobility between jobs, sectors and professions and permeability in the education system will probably remain determining in the future, allowing the workforce to react to changes like technological innovation. He underlines the fact that efforts must be continued to extend the guarantee of the best possible support to young people seeking apprenticeships. “First you need to find training that best fits them, because a bad choice also impacts the labour market. Then, there’s still the work needed in terms of segregation linked to gender, and even access to training for people with migration history”.