Can Switzerland’s Successful Apprenticeship Model Be Transplanted to the U.S.?

American businesses complain about a shortage of skilled, motivated and loyal workers across industries. Can the answer to their dilemma be found in Switzerland?

It starts with creating modern-day apprenticeships. The concept dates as far back as the 18^th century BCE, flourishing in the Middle Ages with the emergence of Europe’s craft guilds. And this venerable practice survives today in a number of societies, offering a blueprint for U.S. companies facing workforce challenges.

Switzerland has found particular success in promoting the model. Approximately 70% of Swiss youth are currently opting for apprenticeship programs, in a country where the youth unemployment rate runs between 2% and 3%. (In the U.S., it currently sits at 9.2%.)

Katie Caves is a researcher specializing in vocational training at the public university ETH Zürich. She says Switzerland’s apprenticeship system is distinguished by its application across multiple industries, including manufacturing, banking, healthcare, metalworking and even musical instrument making, to name a few. In the U.S., by contrast, apprenticeships have been largely restricted to the building and construction trades, supported by labor unions. And they rarely kick in during the high school years.

The Swiss model isn’t especially old. It only dates back to 2004, when a constitutional change allowed for the broadening of apprenticeships across the entire labor market, Caves says. It offered 15- and 16-year-olds in secondary education (beginning in the American equivalent of the 10^th grade) the option to spend one or two days a week in school, and three to four days in a workplace, gaining hands-on skills and training. Upon graduation, participants can then pursue careers as fully skilled professionals, or seek higher education.

“The Swiss system is permeable,” says Caves. “There are opportunities and access points where you can change lanes at any point.”

In the U.S., the path of career and technical education (CTE) isn’t looked on with great respect. It’s largely considered to be a second-tier option for most career seekers. That’s one reason why technical schools generally haven’t gained a foothold in America, even though they’ve proved to be successful in countries such as Germany, Singapore and, of course, Switzerland. (The European Commission supports a number of vocational training programs under the aegis of the European Education Area, which boasts “quality education and training for all.”)

Skeptics of the apprenticeship approach worry that it locks young people into career paths based on choices they made at the beginning of their education journey. In Switzerland, Caves says, the opposite is true. “The Swiss system has a built-in transition mechanism. It’s actually the apprenticeship that’s seen as the ‘keep all your options open’ pathway.”

Caves notes that students seeking higher vocational education in Switzerland can pursue a professional course that leads to the equivalent of a Ph.D., albeit one with an emphasis on applied versus academic work. “Not only do you have the ability to transition across academic, applied and vocational pathways, but you also have qualifications that go all the way to the very highest levels of education,” she says.

Compensation for working apprentices is low by the corporate standards for full-time employment, but Caves frames it as a period for learning and acquiring the necessary skills to do the job and earn formal qualification. “You’re a well-paid student,” she says, “not a poorly paid employee.” A Swiss apprentice typically will earn between 1,000 and 2,000 Swiss francs (about $1,200 to $2,400) per month.

American businesses are sure to ask: Can an employment model that operates within a unique culture such as Switzerland’s be successfully replicated in the U.S.? “You can’t ever copy and paste educational systems,” Caves acknowledges. What U.S. executives and legislators need to do is, first, understand what makes the Swiss system work, and second, figure out which mechanisms can be transplanted to their own country. That might include crafting a type of high school diploma that skews toward vocational and professional skills rather than academics, while ensuring that the two paths don’t bifurcate to the point where students are unable to switch from one to the other. “We can’t pull it off if we don’t have some sort of permeability,” she says.

Labor unions can complicate the experiment. In Switzerland, Caves says, union density “is not super high” and is concentrated within a handful of occupations. But even there, unions need to have the right attitude toward apprenticeship. If they view young entrants as competition for current workers or sources of cheap labor, the program won’t be a success. They need to understand the value of having a steady, long-term source of future workers with the right skills.

“This is very much the attitude that unions have in Switzerland,” Caves says, even though a certain amount of tension between entrenched workers and newcomers is inevitable. “It’s a process, and at the end of it, they arrive at a curriculum that everyone can agree on.”

She sees momentum building in the U.S. for a homegrown apprenticeship model across industries, as American business looks for a way to hire, train and retain workers in an uncertain and highly fluid job market. Efforts to promote the idea are also underway at the federal government level. The ASE Education Foundation, for one, just announced receipt of a $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to generate 6,000 verified apprenticeships in the transportation industry over the next four years.

“Ten years ago, when I started doing this work, I would have to spend a week convincing [American companies] that vocationalism isn’t evil,” Caves says. “Now people say, ‘We know we have to do this. Tell us how.’”