Seventy percent. That is the share of young Swiss people who pursue vocational training after compulsory schooling. In Austria, this figure reaches 68%. These two countries do not produce failures of general education — they have built systems where the vocational pathway is a choice, not a consolation prize. This is what the new comparative OCDE study published in 2025 shows, which examines nine vocational education and training systems around the world.
The question of apprenticeship returns everywhere with renewed urgency. School dropout is costly — in damaged lives, wasted human capital, in public spending engulfed. The downward mobility of university graduates fuels growing distrust in the promises of higher education. And automation silently redraws the map of useful skills. In this context, systems that form people effectively through practice are becoming serious objects of study again. What the OECD reveals is that their secret is not pedagogical. It is institutional.
The Essentials
- In Switzerland, 70% of young people choose the vocational pathway after compulsory schooling; in Austria, 68% — rates that reflect a positive choice, not default selection, according to the 2025 OECD study covering nine countries.
- In Denmark, 100% of vocational training combines school and workplace; in Sweden, this rate drops to 8%, illustrating the colossal gap between neighboring systems that are nonetheless comparable in wealth.
- Functioning systems share three traits: tripartite governance (State, professional branches, unions), direct financing by companies, and externalized exams that guarantee the value of the diploma on the labor market.
- France attempted to import the German model without ever ceding to professional branches the actual governance it requires — and this perpetual half-reform explains most of its difficulties.
In Denmark, 100% of Vocational Training Combines School and Work. In Sweden, 8%.
These two figures, drawn from the same OECD study, are striking because they concern two Nordic countries, comparable in wealth and social organization, separated by a few hundred kilometers. The gap is not climatic; it is institutional.
In Denmark, alternation is not one option among others in vocational training: it is the organizing principle of the entire system. Each apprentice spends periods in companies integrated into the curriculum, supervised by agreements signed between the employer, the school, and the young person. In Sweden, vocational training takes place mainly at school, with minimal company involvement. Both systems display similar objectives on paper. The results, in terms of integration and recognition by employers, diverge significantly.
It is not that the Swedes poorly designed their curricula. It is that they never managed to bring companies on board as co-responsible partners in training. And without this commitment, the vocational diploma remains a school document that the labor market views with skepticism.
The Danish case illustrates a principle that the OECD study formulates clearly: what makes an apprenticeship system work are the institutional arrangements that bind employers to the process. Not the intentions of ministries.
Tripartite Governance, the Invisible Pillar of the Swiss Model
Switzerland trains its young people well not because it found better pedagogical methods. It trains them well because it has built, over several decades, a governance system where three actors share real responsibility: the federal state, the cantons, and professional associations — the Berufsfachverbände — that represent the sectors.
These associations are not consulted. They govern. They define competency frameworks, organize qualification exams, and contribute directly to training financing. Swiss companies invest approximately 5 billion francs per year in initial vocational training, according to data from the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. They do this because they have a direct return on investment: they train according to their needs, with diplomas they helped construct and that they recognize as credible.
This tripartism is not a magic formula. It assumes structured employer organizations capable of speaking on behalf of an entire sector and engaging collectively. It assumes unions that play along without blocking. And it assumes a state that accepts to share actual governance, not merely consult social partners before deciding alone.
This last point is decisive. And it is precisely where France has stumbled for thirty years.
France Has the Vocabulary of Alternation but Not Its Architecture
Since the 1971 law, and with notable acceleration since the 2018 reforms, France has multiplied apprenticeship schemes. Numbers have soared: the country counted approximately 1,021,500 apprentices as of December 31, 2023, compared to 430,000 in 2017, according to data from the Labor Ministry. The government has touted this success as a system transformation. The numbers deserve to be read more precisely.
A significant portion of this growth concentrated in higher education — vocational BTSs, professional licenses, alternating master’s programs — rather than in manual and technical training at CAP or professional baccalaureate level. France developed apprenticeship where it was already socially valued, not where dropout and youth unemployment among the low-skilled are most acute.
Most importantly, the French system remains steered from Paris. Professional branches participate in negotiations on certifications, but governance architecture remains centralized. Exams are organized by the Ministry of Education. Frameworks are validated by the ministry. Financing flows through competency operators — OPCOs — whose operation is regularly criticized for its complexity. SMEs in particular struggle to navigate this administrative maze.
Comparison with Switzerland is unforgiving. In Switzerland, a company wishing to host an apprentice signs a standardized contract with a young person and contributes to a system whose rules it understands because it negotiated them. In France, the same undertaking involves a series of intermediaries, training rights calculated on payroll, certification procedures that change with reforms, and a VET center whose relationship with the sector is variable.
This is not a matter of political will. It is a matter of architecture. And architecture is not reformed by decree.
Prestige Is Built — and Cannot Be Decreed Either
The most frequent argument against French-style apprenticeship is cultural: French families want to send their children to university, vocational training is stigmatized, teachers direct students toward general education. This argument is partially correct. It is also often used to avoid looking at what produces it.
In Switzerland, the vocational pathway is chosen positively because it leads to well-paid jobs, stable careers, and progression opportunities. The Federal Diploma of Competence — the CFC — is recognized by all employers in the country. It allows, via professional maturity, access to specialized universities of applied sciences. Vertical progression exists. The glass ceiling is limited.
In France, the apprentice who graduates with a professional baccalaureate knows he will be viewed differently from one who graduates with a general baccalaureate. This difference in perception is not an immutable cultural idiosyncrasy: it reflects a real difference in prospects, salaries, and recognition on the labor market. The stigma is a consequence, not a cause.
To change perception, one must first change reality. And reality changes when professional sectors appropriate their diplomas, when exams are credible because they are externalized, when pathways to higher levels are real and known.
The OECD notes that countries where participation rates in vocational training are highest are also those where social partners have the most weight in governance. This is not coincidence. It is causation.
AI Will Accelerate Demand for Practical Skills — Provided Training Adapts
Digital transformation of work creates an interesting tension for apprenticeship systems. On one hand, automation threatens certain manual or repetitive occupations that vocational training traditionally prepares. On the other, it generates growing demand for hybrid technical skills — maintaining automated systems, programming industrial robots, managing algorithmic-driven logistics flows — that traditional universities prepare poorly for and that apprenticeship, in direct connection with companies, can train quickly.
Digital and AI skills now earn significantly more than traditional diplomas in several sectors. This premium on practical digital skills is potential windfall for apprenticeship systems — provided they integrate this content into their frameworks and partner companies are themselves cutting-edge.
This is where the Swiss model shows particular robustness. Because professional branches define competency frameworks, these can evolve faster than university programs designed by ministry commissions. When the mechatronics sector needs technicians capable of maintaining production lines piloted by smart sensors, the professional association can revise the CFC in months. A national program directorate would take several years.
This institutional agility may be the true comparative advantage of the tripartite model in a rapidly transforming labor world. Intensive tutoring and accelerated learning methods show that direct transmission of practical skills works, but that scaling remains difficult without proper institutional infrastructure. Dual apprenticeship, when well-governed, is precisely an answer to this scaling challenge.
What France Should Cede to Change Truly
The question is not whether France wants a good apprenticeship system. Every government for the past twenty years has declared wanting one. The question is what the country is willing to cede to build one.
Cede is a strong word. But it is the right one. Building real tripartite governance means transferring to professional branches authority over certifications that the Ministry of Education jealously holds. It means qualification exams are organized by third parties independent of ministries. It means company financing is direct, transparent, and conditioned on results — not mediated by administrative operators whose operating costs absorb part of resources intended for young people.
None of these reforms is technically complex. All have been tested somewhere in Europe. All are politically costly for established actors — teacher unions, inspection bodies, parity operators — with legitimate interests in the status quo.
The OECD study does not say France must copy Switzerland. It says functioning systems share precise institutional characteristics, and these characteristics can be built in different contexts. Denmark is not Switzerland. Germany is not Austria. Each country has adapted the model to its social history and collective bargaining structures.
The French question remains open. With more than a million apprentices, the country has proven it can mobilize demand. It has not yet built the architecture that transforms this mass into recognized human capital, transferable and valued throughout a career. The difference between the two comes down to governance choices that each reform has so far avoided.
Sources
- OECD (2025), Vocational Education and Training Systems in Nine Countries, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/vocational-education-and-training-systems-in-nine-countries_1a86eb6c-en.html
- State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SEFRI), data on apprenticeship financing in Switzerland
- Ministry of Labor (France), data on apprenticeship enrollment 2017-2023
- INSEE — Apprenticeship in France (2023 data), https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8305566
- Swiss Employers’ Association / SEFRI — Apprenticeship cost-benefit study 2022/23, https://www.arbeitgeber.ch/fr/formation/la-formation-des-personnes-en-apprentissage-reste-un-investissement-rentable/
- SEFRI — Joint task Confederation-cantons-Ortra, https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/sbfi/fr/home/bildung/formation-professionnelle-initiale/handbuch-prozess-der-berufsentwicklung/1-gemeinsame-aufgabe-von-bund–kantonen-und-organisationen-der-a.html
- Treasury Directorate / French Embassy in Switzerland — Apprenticeship in Switzerland, https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/Articles/fce732dd-8441-4cd4-a835-f31ef210f4c6/files/9643ab99-2850-4733-9b8b-b682a129fb96
- Euroguidance France — Vocational training in Austria, https://www.euroguidance-france.org/actualites/la-formation-professionnelle-en-autriche/
- DARES — Apprenticeship in 2017, https://dares.travail-emploi.gouv.fr/dares-etudes-et-statistiques/etudes-et-syntheses/dares-analyses-dares-indicateurs-dares-resultats/article/l-apprentissage-en-2017