A silver lining for disadvantaged youth on the apprenticeship market: an experimental study of employers’ hiring preferences

ABSTRACT

In dual vocational education and training (VET) systems, school-leavers in their mid-teens who wish to pursue vocational certificates through in-firm apprenticeships are subjected to the training providers’ quite selective hiring-processes. Previous research shows that youth with weak school performances are one of the groups that have the largest difficulties being hired as apprentices. Less investigated in the literature is what employer characteristics that are conducive for their willingness to hire a disadvantaged apprentice: both on the level of the organisation and of the recruiter. I draw on organisational and institutional literature and on person-organisation fit and ethical decision-making theory to formulate expectations regarding the preferences of the organisations and recruiters. The applied method is a factorial survey experiment administered to in-firm vocational trainers with recruitment authority in the commercial occupation in Switzerland. The findings show that public sector employers are more lenient towards candidates with weaker academic achievements than employers in the private sector. Moreover, respondents with a more egalitarian outlook on the access to vocational training for disadvantaged youths tend to lower their thresholds for the candidates’ academic achievements.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual VET
• disadvantaged youth
• employers’ preferences
• factorial survey
• school-to-work transition

Acknowledgments

The data collection that this paper is based on and was made in cooperation with Flavia Fossati and Giuliano Bonoli. I would like to thank Daniel Auer, Giuliano Bonoli, Patrick Emmenegger, Flavia Fossati, Christian Lyhne Ibsen, Christian Imdorf, Maïlys Korber, Fabienne Liechti and Delia Pisoni and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. The survey questionnaire greatly benefitted from feedback from Fabienne Liechti, Nicolas Pekari, Lina Seitzl, Alexandra Strebel and Jean-François Trinh Tan, and French proofreading from Mélanie Chévalley.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. It is however likely that employers in the least intellectually demanding programmes look for indicators of other perhaps more practical skills alongside of school grades.

2. Randomly varying the type of apprenticeship in commercial training and included one that lasts two years (shop-assistant, AFP) and one three-year programme (commercial employee extended profile, CFC).

3. See full model in Table S1 in the Supplemental material.

4. The scale of the figure is identical to the 0–10 points Likert scale used in the experiment, meaning that the value of 1 in the figure (from the baseline) equals 1 point in the vignette rating.

5. Full statistical model in Table S2 in the Supplemental material.

6. Full statistical model in Table S3 in the Supplemental material.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss research cluster entitled Governance in Vocational and Professional Education and Training (GOVPET), which is funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).