How apprenticeships work in Germany, Switzerland, Australia and the US

Rules and figures checked: 2026-07-25. Funding, tenancy and tax rules move — verify before relying on them.

Every UK conversation about apprenticeships eventually arrives at Germany. Someone says "well, in Germany", everyone nods, and the discussion moves on without anybody establishing what happens in Germany.

It's worth knowing, for three reasons. It tells you what the UK system is trying to imitate and where it falls short. It reveals the one thing the UK does that almost nobody else does, which is directly relevant to the thing you're applying for. And if you ever get asked at an interview why you chose this route, being able to place it internationally is a considerably better answer than most of what gets said in that chair.

Germany: the dual system

The German duale Ausbildung is the model everyone means. An apprentice spends three to four days a week with an employer and the rest at a Berufsschule, a vocational school, for two to three and a half years.

The part that doesn't translate to Britain is the governance. German apprenticeships are administered by the chambers of commerce — the IHKs — which register every training contract, approve which companies are allowed to train, and run the final examinations. Membership of the chamber is compulsory for German businesses. So the system has a permanent, employer-owned institutional layer that exists regardless of which government is in office, which is precisely what Britain has spent sixty years failing to build and then abolishing whenever it half-succeeded (the history is here).

The scale is real: 486,700 new training contracts were concluded in 2024, according to the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, across more than 300 recognised training occupations, with BIBB describing something like half of German school leavers as taking this route.

But it's under strain, and the honest version matters. New contracts have been drifting downwards for over a decade as more young people go to university. And the matching is getting worse: in 2024 there were 69,400 unfilled training places and 31,200 applicants left without a placement — a simultaneous shortage and surplus, which is what happens when the vacancies and the applicants aren't in the same places or the same occupations.

The nearest German equivalent to a degree apprenticeship is the duales Studium — a dual study programme combining a degree with structured company placement — which is a separate track from the classic Ausbildung and much smaller.

Switzerland: the one that works best

Switzerland runs a similar dual model and gets the highest participation in the developed world. After compulsory schooling at 15 or 16, around two-thirds of Swiss young people go into vocational education, choosing from roughly 250 federally recognised occupations, mostly on the same three-or-four-days-in-a-company pattern.

The feature that makes it work — and the one the UK has only just started copying — is progression. Swiss apprentices can take the Federal Vocational Baccalaureate alongside their apprenticeship, an extra academic component of about half a day a week, which gives direct access to the Universities of Applied Sciences. So the vocational route is not a dead end and choosing it at 15 doesn't close the academic door at 22.

That's the same problem the UK is trying to solve by putting Level 3 apprenticeships into the UCAS tariff from September 2026 (covered here). Switzerland solved it decades ago, which is roughly the summary of Swiss VET policy generally.

Australia: broad, and currently shrinking

Australia bundles two things under "Australian Apprenticeships": traditional trade apprenticeships and much shorter traineeships in service occupations. That breadth makes the headline numbers look larger than a UK-style comparison would suggest.

The direction is the notable bit. Contracts in training have been falling — down 11.3% in the twelve months to June 2025, with non-trade contracts falling roughly three times as fast as trade ones. A softening labour market plus the tapering of pandemic-era employer incentives will do that, and it's a useful reminder that apprenticeship numbers anywhere are a function of hiring appetite, not of policy enthusiasm.

The United States: growing fast from a low base

American registered apprenticeships are a Department of Labor programme, and they have grown substantially: 678,014 active apprentices in the 2025 financial year, up around 88% on a decade earlier, heavily concentrated in construction and the building trades.

For a country of that size it's still a small system — the US route into professional occupations runs overwhelmingly through college. The interesting development is a nascent degree apprenticeship movement, pushed by policy institutes and a handful of states, linking registered apprenticeships to actual college degrees. Which is to say: they're trying to build what the UK already has.

What the UK actually does differently

Set side by side, three differences stand out.

No permanent institutional layer. Germany and Switzerland have chambers and social partners that own the system. Britain has whichever government body was created most recently — currently Skills England, which replaced IfATE in 2025, which replaced the Institute for Apprenticeships from 2017, and so on back through Sector Skills Councils, Learning and Skills Council, TECs and Industrial Training Boards. The instability is the defining feature of British skills policy, and it's why the rules will change while you're on the programme is a genuine planning concern here in a way it isn't in Zurich.

Funded by a levy on large employers rather than by compulsory membership or general taxation. That's the German ITB idea, reimported in 2017, and it has the effects described here.

And this is the good one: the UK merged apprenticeships with degrees. In the German and Swiss systems, vocational and academic are parallel tracks, joined by bridges. In England since 2015 you can do an apprenticeship that is a bachelor's degree — same university, same award, no tuition fees, employed and paid throughout. Very few countries have that as a mainstream, funded route. It's the thing American policy institutes are currently trying to build, and it's the thing you're applying for.

And where the UK is weak

Participation at the young end. Only 21.2% of English apprenticeship starts in 2024/25 went to under-19s, and over half went to people aged 25 and over. Set that against two-thirds of Swiss school leavers entering vocational education and the gap is not subtle. The English system has become, in large part, a workforce development programme for adults already in employment — which is what the funding restrictions of the last eighteen months are attempting to reverse.

The UK also lacks the thing that makes the German and Swiss systems legible: a stable, universally understood map of occupations that every parent and teacher can navigate. Ours is a register of 172 Level 6 and 7 standards that most careers advisers have never opened.

Three things this is actually useful for

Answering the "why not university" question. "Because the UK is one of very few countries where you can get a full bachelor's degree as part of a paid apprenticeship, and that route didn't exist a decade ago" is a considerably stronger answer than most. The full version of that conversation is here.

Understanding what will and won't travel. If you might work abroad, the transferable part of your qualification is the degree. A UK bachelor's is internationally legible. An English apprenticeship certificate, a Level 6 designation and a standard reference number are not — no HR department in Frankfurt will know what ST0119 means. That's an argument for checking whether your standard includes a degree, since 30 of the 113 Level 6 standards don't.

Calibrating the doom. British commentary about apprenticeships tends towards crisis. It's worth knowing that Germany has a matching crisis, Australia's numbers are falling faster than ours, and the US is building from a far lower base. Ours is not uniquely broken. It's unstable, badly explained, and — at degree level — genuinely unusual in a good way.

The one-line version

Germany and Switzerland run better vocational systems with permanent employer institutions and clean progression routes; England runs an unstable one that keeps being reorganised — but England is one of the only places in the world where the apprenticeship is the degree, which is the whole reason this site exists.