Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship October 20, 2014

Tamara Jacoby reports at the Atlantic on the important role that apprenticeship or “dual training” (classroom and on-the-job) programs play in equipping European workers. 

She acknowledges that the US has its own tradition of apprenticeship, but adds: “like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality.”

In the US, apprenticeships are for kids who couldn’t make it in college, but in Germany “The employer and the employee still respect practical work. German firms don’t view dual training as something for struggling students or at-risk youth.”

In Germany, apprenticeships depend on young people making early choices about career tracks, and also depends on a centralized, state-run education and job-training. Neither of those is likely to fly in America, but that doesn’t prevent US companies from initiating their own apprenticeship programs, and many have.

What Jacoby calls the “biggest” obstacle to apprenticeship isn’t structural or political but cultural: “American attitudes toward practical skills and what Germans still unabashedly call ‘blue-collar’ work.” 


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