Two-year apprenticeships – a successful model of training?

Abstract

Educational policy is asked to support young people in their successful transition from education to employment. In Switzerland, a two-year apprenticeship with Federal VET Certificate was established in 2002 aimed at increasing the employability of low-achieving school leavers. It is a low-threshold VET programme offering standardised vocational training to low-achieving youths. It leads to a VET Certificate, which is different from the Federal VET Diploma obtained after a three- or four-year apprenticeship. Data of two Swiss longitudinal studies including a sample of apprentices on a two-year training course with either a special needs (N = 28) or a regular school (N = 261) background at lower secondary, and a sample of graduates on a three-year training course (N = 118) are used to study the success of the two-year apprenticeship from a comparative perspective. The findings confirm that the new apprenticeship offers favourable learning opportunities that foster employability and upward mobility after graduation. However, the findings also indicate limitations of the two-year apprenticeship, such as the least successful learners can only profit from the new form of apprenticeship to a certain degree.

Keywords:

• apprenticeship
• school-to-work transition
• low achievers
• VET reform
• longitudinal study
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The Swiss youth panel study TREE (Transitions from Education to Employment; www.unibas.ch) has been running since 2000 and has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the University of Basel, the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics, the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET), and the cantons of Berne, Geneva and Ticino.

The VET Certificate-Career Study (VET-CCS) has been financed by the OPET and by the University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education, Zürich.

We would like to thank Lars Balzer, Laurent Fillietaz, Thomas Meyer and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.

Notes

aOr other educational programme leading to an upper secondary diploma with higher demands;

bNumbers in bold: standardised adjusted residuals > 2.0.

1. Until 2005, two of the apprenticeships in the sample, which led to the Federal VET Certificate (EFZ), lasted only two years. This has changed with the introduction of the new ordinances.