Thank you for this piece . I hope a lot of young graduates can take a cue from this . Apprenticeships and internships is the way . it gets you busy , your mind is engaged, you gain work experience , you learn all the soft skills employers look out for in a prefered employee and you are just closer to your dream job and desired paycheck .
fantastic piece

Dear cRoss,

thanks for your response to my blog. Don’t let anybody tell you that apprenticeships are “idiotic”, they are not!

Keep in mind that more than 60 % of the young people between 16 – 24 years in Switzerland go through an apprenticeship at one point in their work life and most of them benefit from it like I did in my career in Germany. You will at least have one job for a while that will let you start a career, while others are still looking to overcome that work-inexperience gap.

Keep in mind that almost 90% of the young people in Switzerland who finish an apprenticeships do find skilled work after the apprenticeships and then they take these (usually well paid) jobs in banks, crafts, services and industry

Tell those people that call apprenticeships “dumb ways” that one day you will get a head start when you make CHF 6,000 or more per month when they are still jumping from one (maybe even unpaid) internship to the next.

Heads up, cRoss, apprenticeships are for winners!

Best,

Michael Axmann

Dear Coen,

I am just on my way to Asia and I can understand your question very well, because we see that still relatively often that apprenticeships are not designed in the right way, not only in India, but in many countries in Asia and elsewhere.

What is really important for us in the ILO in order to address what you are talking about is to work with government ministries , employers AND trade unions to make sure that our ILO quality apprenticeship programmes exclude what you are talking about: exploitation and cheap labour.

There are certain countries that have encouraged apprenticeships through wage subsidies, such as Denmark in the past. However, wage subsidies tend to send some of the wrong messages, namely that employers do not need to worry to take apprentices. It is always better to have employers pay for decent apprenticeship wages and they will, if they really want to address skills gaps and mismatches in their companies, in their sectors and in the economy as a whole.

Hope that answers your questions.

Best, Michael Axmann