Nearly one in three apprenticeship contracts is terminated early in Germany — but half of these young people restart training in the same dual system, so that the rate of definitive abandonment is estimated at around 13%. In 2022, the termination rate reached 29.5%, its highest level in ten years, compared to 25% in 2013. That same year, 54,400 apprenticeship positions remained unfilled in September 2025 according to the Berufsbildungsbericht 2026. The model that the OECD cites as an example to France, Greece, and Spain is suffering, silently, from a crisis that its international promoters struggle to name.
The German dual system is built on a simple principle: the company trains, the school completes. For two to three years, the apprentice splits their time between the workshop or office and the classroom. This model has produced one of Europe’s lowest youth unemployment rates, long below 6%. It remains a global reference. But a global reference can traverse a crisis at home while continuing to be recommended abroad.
The Essentials
- The rate of apprenticeship contract termination reached 29.5% in 2022, an increase of nearly five points in ten years (Berufsbildungsbericht 2026); the rate of definitive abandonment is estimated at around 13%, because half of young people who terminate sign a new contract in the same system.
- 54,400 unfilled positions in September 2025 coexist with 84,400 young people still seeking a position (including 39,900 with no solution at all), a sign of profound mismatch rather than a simple shortage of applicants.
- Women represent only 36% of new apprentices, concentrated in a small number of low-paid sectors.
- Support programs for apprentices in difficulty have been evaluated in recent years in Germany; results are promising on support, but these mechanisms do not yet address the structural causes of terminations.
- The real challenge is not the number of positions, but the perceived quality of the training experience and the social status of the trades involved.
29.5%: A Rupture That Is Not an Accident
The figure calls for nuanced reading. Nearly one contract in three is terminated before its term — but at least half of these young people sign a new contract in the same dual system, and the rate of definitive abandonment is estimated at around 13% according to the BIBB. This termination rate varies considerably by sector: it exceeds 40% in catering, hairdressing, and food retail, it remains below 10% in banking professions or skilled manufacturing trades. So it is not the entire model that is wavering, it is part of its foundation — precisely the part that welcomes the least qualified young people upon entry, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, and women.
This sectoral gradient reveals something essential: where apprenticeship leads to decent pay, clear career progression, and social recognition, young people stay. Where it leads to jobs perceived as dead ends or sectors with high difficulty without visible compensation, they leave. This is not a crisis of apprenticeship as pedagogy. It is a crisis of the attractiveness of certain trades, which apprenticeship reveals the reality of to those who enter them.
The rise in terminations since 2013 coincides with several shifts. The German labor market has tightened. Young people have more alternatives: longer studies are more accessible, and some service employers recruit without qualifying diplomas. In a market where competition for young people is intense, sectors that have not adapted their working conditions lose their apprentices to other paths.
54,400 Unfilled Positions, 84,400 Young People Searching
The most striking paradox of the dual system in 2025 lies in this double figure: 54,400 unfilled apprenticeship positions at the start of the school year, and simultaneously 84,400 young people still searching for a position — including 39,900 with no solution at all — according to the Berufsbildungsbericht 2026. This is not a shortage of supply, nor a shortage of demand. It is a matching problem.
Employers offering positions in strained sectors (crafts, catering, certain segments of retail) cannot find candidates. Young people seeking training cannot obtain a position in the fields they are targeting, often more qualified, more technical, better paid. The stock of available positions and the stock of young people without training pass by each other without meeting.
This mismatch is costly for everyone. For employers, it means unfilled positions and increased pressure on existing employees. For young people, it means elongated trajectories, years of drift, an increased risk of definitive dropout. For the model, it means that its main argument, rapid and qualifying professional integration, becomes jammed precisely where it is needed most.
The Bundesagentur für Arbeit has documented this gap in its successive annual reports. It is not being resolved. It has even widened slightly since 2019, despite sectoral communication campaigns and financial incentive programs for companies.
What Evaluations Have Shown, and What They Haven’t Said
German support programs for apprentices in difficulty have been evaluated in recent years. These mechanisms target vulnerable young people: those who arrive in training with significant academic gaps, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, those whose mother tongue is not German. They offer them individualized support, tutors, enhanced monitoring during the first weeks.
Results are encouraging on the support level. Young people followed show higher retention rates than those who did not benefit from these mechanisms. Available evaluations note that early intervention works, that the cost per beneficiary is moderate, and that these mechanisms deserve to be sustained and expanded.
But these evaluations also note their own limitations with a frankness that deserves to be highlighted. These programs act at the margins: they help young people who would have left to stay, but they do not change the conditions that push young people to leave. The quality of workplace supervision, the level of apprentice wages, career prospects following training, the difficulty of working conditions in certain sectors: these structural determinants of terminations remain outside the scope of these interventions.
This is inherent to this type of intervention: effective at its level, insufficient on its own. Supporting the most vulnerable is necessary. But it does not compensate for unattractive trades.
36% Women: An Inequality Structured by Sector Choices
The share of women among new apprentices stands at 36% according to the Berufsbildungsbericht 2026. This overall figure hides a more nuanced and more concerning reality. Women are not absent from apprenticeship; they are concentrated in a limited number of trades: medical assistant, dental assistant, sales clerk, hairdresser. These trades share two characteristics: they are among the lowest-paid in the apprenticeship spectrum, and they display among the highest termination rates.
High-paying technical trades, mechatronician, electrical technician, IT specialist, remain more than 80% male. This segregation is not unique to Germany, but it is particularly striking in a system that categorizes early and orients strongly. Orientation choices at 15 or 16 years old, under the influence of family representations, school counseling, and gender stereotypes, determine wage trajectories that will span an entire professional life.
Programs exist to broaden young girls’ choices: awareness days in industrial companies, mentoring, campaigns targeting teachers. Their impact remains limited as long as working conditions in predominantly female trades do not improve. Attracting women toward male-dominated trades is a partial strategy; improving the trades where they are already present would be another, complementary one.
Does the Model Reproduce Itself in Other Soils?
France, Greece, and Spain have all, to varying degrees, sought to learn from the dual model. In France, the number of apprenticeship contracts saw considerable expansion between 2017 and 2022: according to DARES, the number of contracts in the private sector was multiplied by 2.8 over this period, reaching 837,000 new contracts signed in 2022, driven by an ambitious reform and massive financial incentives to employers. This dynamic is real and deserves to be documented without naïveté.
But it raises a question that German experience poses acutely: does quantitative growth in apprenticeship measure its quality? An apprenticeship position in a sector with a high termination rate, with insufficient supervision and limited prospects, is not equivalent to a position in a structured industrial pathway with a guaranteed outcome. Counting contracts is not counting successful trajectories.
The OECD recommends the dual model by insisting on its operating conditions: a dense fabric of training companies, solid social partnerships between employers and unions, a culture of company training anchored in several generations. These conditions cannot be decreed. In Germany, they took decades to establish and are today under pressure in certain sectors. Countries that borrow the model inherit the principle without the conditions.
This does not disqualify apprenticeship as a pathway. It calls for looking at what actually works in the model, and what is the product of a particular historical context. The ambition to train young people in companies is right. The conditions for its success are demanding.
Why the Identity of the Trade Is at Stake
Beneath the numbers lies a deeper question. An apprentice who terminates their contract does not simply abandon a diploma. They abandon a professional identity in construction. In sectors with high termination rates, qualitative surveys conducted by the Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung often describe the same pattern: a young person who enters training with a certain image of the trade, and who discovers a different reality, made up of repetitive tasks, hierarchies that are not benevolent, disappointing wages.
The hiatus between image and reality is not unique to apprenticeship. But it is particularly costly there, because the termination occurs early in an already uncertain trajectory. Young people who abandon their apprenticeship do not automatically find another path: some enter cycles of short training, temporary work, progressive dropout.
What termination figures actually measure is the gap between the promise made to young people entering dual training and what some employers actually deliver. This gap, the OECD cannot fill through policy recommendations. It is bridged in the company, through quality supervision, decent working conditions, and visible progression.
The question Germany poses to its European partners is therefore less “how to reproduce the model” than “how to guarantee that companies actually train.” This is a problem of governance internal to training systems, quality control, sanctioning of failing employers. Levers exist: in Switzerland, whose dual system is often cited as even more robust than Germany’s, regular evaluations of the quality of workplace supervision are part of the mechanism. In Germany, they remain insufficient in sectors with high termination rates.
Debates about automation and AI in manual and service trades further complicate the equation. A young person entering an apprenticeship as a mechanic, cook, or sales clerk legitimately wonders what that trade will be in ten years. Organizations that anticipate these transitions have a decisive advantage in retaining their apprentices. Those that do not see their young people leave before completion.
The silent crisis of German apprenticeship says something that OECD dashboards do not easily capture: a model reproduces itself when it keeps its promises to those who enter it. When the identity of the trade loses meaning in the eyes of a 16-year-old, no support program alone can rebuild what working conditions have undone. The question for countries inspired by the model is what guarantees they are prepared to impose on training companies, and not simply what contract volumes they intend to reach.
Sources
- OECD, Evaluation of an Apprenticeship Support Programme for Young People in Germany (2025): link
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Berufsbildungsbericht 2026 (no link — official annual report)
- Bundesagentur für Arbeit, annual reports on unfilled apprenticeship positions and young people without training (no link — annual data)
- Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB), qualitative surveys on causes of apprenticeship contract termination (no link — annual publications)
- Berufsbildungsbericht 2026 - Official BMBFSFJ Press Release
- Bundesregierung - Berufsbildungsbericht 2026
- BIBB / Arbeitswelt-Portal - Solution Rate 2022
- Kompetenzz.de - Berufsbildungsbericht 2026 and Share of Women
- Info.gouv.fr - Apprenticeship in France 2022