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Gunter Grittmann
Head of Information and Communication
E-mail: grittmann@zew.de
Phone: +49 (0)621-1235-132
Fax: +49 (0)621-1235-255
Kathrin Böhmer
Public Relations Officer
E-mail: boehmer@zew.de
Phone: +49 (0)621-1235-103
Fax: +49 (0)621-1235-255
Quality vocational education pays off for young professionals who stay with their training companies, as has been shown over and over. According to new insights, however, young professionals who change to a new company directly after their training period can benefit as well: from a good training quality and from a strict selection of trainees by their training company. This is an important finding since employees who change to a new company directly after their vocational training are frequently suspected of having a below-average performance. A notably worse payment compared to professionals who stay with their training company is the immediate consequence of this presumption. Some of the young professionals who change to a new company manage to avoid severe cuts in payment since they are able to convince the new company of having had an excellent vocational education. The new employers usually take a close look on the quality of the training firms and accordingly adjust their payment offers. They might for example reward applicants if they had been trained in a large company, if their former companies paid their trainees relatively high wages , and if their former companies had works councils supervising the quality of the vocational education. These factors contribute to an increase of the initial payment of those who change to a new company of up to eight per cent. These are the main findings of a recent study conducted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany. read more
It is often asserted that the costs of apprentices considerably exceed their productivity. However, in comparison to the alternative to hire unskilled or semi-skilled employees, this is not the case for most occupations. This is the result of a representative study by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim and the University of Zurich. The study shows that particularly apprentices in the commercial occupations as well as in the trade and construction occupations are more profitable for firms than unskilled or semi-skilled employees. The situation is different for apprentices in the industrial occupations. There the cost-benefit ratio is worse for apprentices than for unskilled or semi-skilled labour. However, apprentices with industrial occupations only account for 30 percent of all trainees in the dual apprenticeship system. read more