High school in Switzerland blends work with learning

A nationwide system that matches high school students with training, jobs, and education helps power a strong economy and keep older teenagers engaged.

“Her room was a mess,” Ursula’s mother said of her 15-year-old daughter. “We bugged her to get up on time, and getting her out the door to school was always an argument.”

But Ursula’s mother, supervisor of her company’s 80-plus 16- to 19-year-old, Zurich-based apprentices with whom I was visiting, went on with the story. “This morning, Ursula was up at 6:30 a.m., no prompting needed, her bed made, her suit pressed, and purse in hand, she was out the door at 7 to catch the train to the bank where she works two days a week. I see this all the time when young people get their apprenticeships.”

Ursula hadn’t dropped out of school; she was going to school the way three-quarters of Swiss teenagers do: She had chosen the apprenticeship system to complete what would be grades 11 through 13 in the U.S.

Among the four or five top factors contributing to Switzerland’s economic success is the system of vocational and professional education that engages teenagers.

During her final and last compulsory year of secondary school, Ursula visited numerous workplaces, learned about careers, and, interested in money — as many 15-year-olds are — she signed a contract to begin her apprenticeship in the finance industry. That contract came with a preset program of study. Ursula spends two days a week in school learning languages, history, economics, and doing sports and two or three days a week working under the supervision of a bank employee trained to follow the industry’s standard applied curriculum. A few days a month, Ursula joins hundreds of banking industry newbies at the Center for Young Professionals (CYP) where she and her age mates learn the fundamentals of their chosen industry. Ursula’s friends work in municipal government, nursing facilities, advanced manufacturing plants, as carpenters, and in construction. They have schedules just like hers.

Low unemployment

Switzerland has a youth unemployment rate below 3.5%, high wages and living standards, an admirably skilled and technically trained workforce, and a highly productive economy. Among the four or five top factors contributing to the country’s economic success is the system of vocational and professional education that engages teenagers during what in the U.S. would be the last two years of high school and the first year of college.

Americans now spend a larger portion of their lives working than they do eating, sleeping, studying, or even watching television. For every young person in the U.S., whatever their background, one of the essential purposes of schooling should be to help them develop the knowledge, skills, and competence needed to search for and obtain work that they find satisfying. And yet the U.S. education system does little to introduce young people to the working world or to prepare them for just how large a role work is likely to play in the rest of their lives. It also bores many of them, and many see no connection between school and the jobs and occupations they will take up once they have graduated (Bridgeland, DiIulio, & Morison, 2006).

The Swiss have made learning to work and learning about work central to their education system. So for the purposes of this article, the most important lesson to be learned from Switzerland has to do not with its economic success, impressive as it is, but with the thoughtfulness it has given to designing an engaging approach to learning — one that is developmentally tailored to support teenagers in growing up, making it a particularly interesting model for U.S. policy makers to study (Hoffman, 2011; Hoffman & Schwartz, 2014).

The Swiss have made learning to work and learning about work central to their education system.

But, readers may wonder, why not feature Germany, the better-known exemplar of what is known as the dual system? The answer arises from the two concerns Americans raise when discussing European vocational education: Does the system use tests to track students from an early age? Do immigrants and low-income students have equal chances? Despite major investments, Germany has had little success in engaging the least affluent quartile of its student population — immigrants and the German children of guest workers. By contrast, the Swiss system seems to work well for 95% of its young people, including the 25% of students born outside of the country.

Excess of applicants

The Swiss system is also highly permeable and not stigmatized. After their apprenticeships, students have a wide range of options: continuing in the labor force, entering a university of applied sciences, or moving onto the academic track. About 40% of the Swiss 15-year-olds who score 4 or 5 on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (i.e., the top end of the range) choose vocational education, signaling that apprenticeship is a high-status way to learn. In fact, some openings for apprentices in the financial industry and information technology attract nearly 10 times the number of applicants that they can accommodate. The appeal is clear in the way companies advertise to attract applications from 15-year-olds: In its web advertisement for apprentices under a picture of a long-haired teen on a skate board, an IT provider says you will be an independent learner; you will have a coach, not a teacher; and you will have choices of what to learn — and, even more enticing, you will get a mobile phone, a laptop, and six weeks of vacation.  Swisscom, the major Swiss mobile phone and Internet provider, aimed this advertisement text at 15-year-olds completing secondary school:

Apprenticeships: Take control of your future

About 850 apprentices shape their future careers with us. By joining them, you can learn how to develop your aptitudes into expertise and put your personality to good use on a daily basis. Participate in challenging projects and tackle them as a team with your colleagues.

Learn from the Swiss

No, the U.S. is not Switzerland, but the U.S. could adapt some Swiss practices outlined here. First, we would have to change our minds about what teenagers can do since the key to Swiss success is that they believe and the data confirm that teenagers can proudly and happily take on adult tasks in a work setting, contribute to the company’s bottom line, and earn compensation for their work. Perhaps most important, teenagers can be eager to get up in the morning and leave their homes because what they do is engaging, varied, and developmentally appropriate. The Swiss practices that make the system work and are most likely to influence the current U.S. movement to modernize career education include engaging employers through sector or industry organizations such as Ursula’s training company, CYP, designing competency-based curriculum, and establishing outcomes and exit assessments that are standardized and recognized by employers across all 50 states. The Pathways to Prosperity report (Symonds, Schwartz, & Ferguson, 2011) argued for adapting aspects of the European model for the U.S.  Housed at Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit based in Boston, the Pathways to Prosperity Network of which I am a leader, is working to put such practices in place in 12 states and many regions across the U.S. Harder to imagine in the U.S. is a system for training trainers within companies to work with young people or actualizing the principle that anything that can be taught at work should be — whether chemistry for cooks or programming for aspiring engineers or having a qualifications framework that includes the knowledge, competencies, and behaviors for 250 professions.

How it works

Here’s how the Swiss vocational system works: Small and large companies, state-of-the-art factories, insurance agencies, banks, hospitals, retail stores, and child care centers host 16- to 19-year-old apprentices who serve customers, work on complex machines, carry out basic medical procedures, and advise investors. In sum, they do everything an entry-level employee would do, albeit under the wings of credentialed trainers within the company. About 30% of Swiss companies participate. They pay the students wages, provide trainers, and participate through their sector organizations in designing curricula and student assessments. Student learning is highly personalized; changes in course are acceptable and even encouraged. Young professionals earn an average monthly starting wage of $800 (U.S.), rising to $1,200 (U.S.) by their third year, a rate below the Swiss minimum but attractive for a teenager living at home (see www.berufsberatung.ch/dyn/46447.aspx).

Apprentices’ productive work returns the cost of training and a bit more to their employers (Wolter, 2009). In return, Swiss employers have a “talent pipeline of young professionals” who can move seamlessly into full-time work and can go on later if they wish to earn a bachelor’s degree or even a Ph.D., often at the company’s expense.

The commercial sector has 23 areas of specialization, including banking, retail, public administration, and some areas of IT, and is the most popular choice of vocational education and training (VET) students. The program has gone on a major collaborative reform called for by employers. This reform, which took place over six years, restructured commercial training to respond to the needs of the global market. Today, commercial training promotes worker autonomy and “business process thinking“ among its 16- to 19-year-old apprentices who must learn to be reflective and to self-assess using a required “course journal.” CYP introduces this approach in the banking industry.

Further schooling possible

While there are no studies of the experience of apprentices at work, on four study trips to Switzerland, I have had opportunities to observe apprentices in various settings and to talk with them on many occasions.

Interviews with students and a quick walk around CYP confirm that these principles are practiced: Everyone has a tablet from which they can download course materials; here and there, small groups gather to solve problems together, and when pulled at random from a group to speak with visitors, two first-year apprentices are confident, outspoken (in English), and unequivocal that they have made a much better choice than spending more time sitting in classrooms at an academic high school. Now that they have seen what they would be doing in the industry, both have plans to earn the vocational baccalaureate and, after working for a while, an advanced degree at a university of applied sciences.

Student learning is highly personalized; changes in course are acceptable and even encouraged.

One can observe slightly different routines for teenagers who start their training at the Lernzentrum Industrielle Berufslehren Schweiz (LIBS), a vocational education training center for the manufacturing industry, just across the parking lot from ABB Turbocharger and next to the VET school where students complete the academic and theoretical requirements for upper secondary. With 150,000 employees worldwide, ABB is the world’s largest supplier of industrial motors and drives, generators for the wind industry, and power grids (see http://new.abb.com/about/abb-in-brief). Because LIBS prepares young people for highly technical work in companies, students spend two years at LIBS before being moved into the company for full-time work. But LIBS students do more than practice on machines; initial study applies the engineering, math, and physics principles learned in school so that students can carry out projects for LIBS almost immediately.  For example, they make high-end parts for which LIBS receives about 3 million Swiss francs per year ($3.15 million U.S.), an offset to the 3.5 million francs ($3.38 million U.S.) the company spends on state-of-the-art machinery and equipment.

Just as CYP partners work with the Swiss Bankers Association to design competence standards, curriculum, and assessments, and keep up with member needs, LIBS is one of several training partners of SwissMEM, the Swiss association of mechanical and electrical engineering industries. Under contract to train for 85 companies, LIBS works with about 1,200 of the more than 8,200 young people under training in mechanical and electrical engineering industries at a cost per student for four years of about 100,000 Swiss francs ($105,102 U.S.). LIBS prepares students to be computer technicians, commercial employees, engineering designers and logisticians.

Metacognition

Students entering the social care sector — very popular among young people — also work as apprentices. Bildungszentrum Interlaken (BZI) is a deeply impressive vocational school training for occupations as diverse as electronics, elder care, hospitality, and construction. Sixteen-year-old BZI students begin their elder care training in a nursing home where they attend to Alzheimer residents and other elderly people with serious conditions. While young people in the United States might volunteer in such a place, 16-year-old students would likely not be entrusted with drawing blood, taking blood pressure, distributing medications, and helping severely impaired residents move about.

And finally, VET curriculum gives priority to the teaching of metacognition, giving students regular opportunities to discuss what they are learning and why they are learning it. Thus, when foreign visitors ask VET students about their experience, they are able to describe the three pillars of vocational education — “wissen,” “konnen,” and “machen” (or know, know how to, and apply) — and explain why learning content, methodology, and social and behavioral skills (the what, how to, and how to behave) is important.

Consider the presentations made by young people completing the highly technical first two years of the polymechanic program at LIBS. Two young men provided a close look at a series of inventive assignments leading to their final year’s project. They explained that they had designed and produced a hydraulic machine to lift heavy kitchen cabinets and hold them in place for an installer. However, their goal was not just to construct the machine but also to turn the design process into a demonstration problem for 15-year-old students, who were spending several days on site to see whether they might want to pursue a polymechanic apprenticeship.

Thus, the assignment required the second-year students not only to know the mechanical principles but also to take a step back and think about what they had learned so they could translate those principles into a task suitable for less knowledgeable young people. Further, the project was totally self-directed and included self-assessments in workflow management, problem solving, explanation of the method of approach, and the ability to seek help when needed.

A good thing

Such activities and assignments are, to put it mildly, very different and more powerful than what one typically observes in U.S. high school classrooms. In short, they amount to a learning experience that engages young people in advanced academic content, teamwork, metacognition, persistence, problem solving, critical thinking, effective communication, and more — all in the context of developmentally appropriate real-world challenges.

A visitor to Switzerland who studied the VET program wrote, “The school is not the center of the world.” For Swiss teenagers, and probably for many others around the world, that is a good thing.

References

Bridgeland, J.M., DiIulio, J.J., & Morison, K.B. (2006). The silent epidemic: Perspectives on high school dropouts. Washington, DC: Civic Enterprises.

Hoffman, N. (2011). Schooling in the workplace: How six of the world’s best vocational education systems prepare young people for jobs and life. Cambridge MA: Harvard Education Press.

Hoffman, N. & Schwartz, R. (2014). The Swiss vocational education system: International comparative study of leading vocational education systems. Washington, DC: National Center on Education and the Economy.

Symonds, W.C., Schwartz, R., & Ferguson, R.F. (2011). Pathways to prosperity: Meeting the challenge of preparing young Americans for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Pathways to Prosperity Project.

Wolter, S. (2009). Cost and benefit of apprenticeship training: A comparison of German and Switzerland. Applied Economics Quarterly, 55 (1), 7-36.

Citation: Hoffman, N. (2015). High school in Switzerland blends work with learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 97 (3), 29-33.