Short of a New Year’s Resolution? Join me, become an apprentice!

I’m an apprentice. Well, I was an apprentice when I started out on my career. I learned to be a ‘Kaufmann’, a vocational training that teaches young people the skills they need to run a business. In Switzerland, going straight from school to university is not the only pathway to a successful career. Apprenticeships are a mainstay of the Swiss economy – with their unique combination that weaves in a timetable of college training with working at a company. The secret of its success? The combination of cutting-edge knowledge with practical learning on the job. Plus, apprenticeships are a great platform for further studies – in my case, I studied Applied Sciences at university.?

These days, I’m prompted quite often to think back to the days of my apprenticeship – whenever I’m invited to join a discussion about the future of work.

Change is speeding up

Once upon a time, well before I became an apprentice, the things people learned during their apprenticeship would teach them everything they needed to know during their entire career.

Technology, or course, has changed all that. And during the past two or three decades, this change has been speeding up – constantly, relentlessly. We’ve now reached the point – especially for digital skills – where anything you know now may well be out of date in just two or three years from now.

Remember, it’s just a little over a decade ago that we marvelled at the first smartphones, while cloud computing was for start-ups and non-critical business applications only. Today, digital mobility and cloud platforms are supporting nearly everything we do – whether it’s for work or in our personal lives. And yet, most people finish their education when they are 18, 19, or – if they go to university – at around 25 at the latest.

A haphazard training and skills landscape

Digital transformation, artificial intelligence and automation are evolving so rapidly that employees – from the factory floor all the way to the board room – constantly have to update and upgrade their skill sets. They effectively need to learn a new job every 15 years, if not earlier.

But that’s where things are getting tricky. Many companies expect to be able to hire people today with the fully formed skills of tomorrow. Small- and medium-sized companies, meanwhile, often don’t have the scale and resources to provide future-ready in-house training themselves.

When politicians and businesspeople complain about a digital skills gap, they often overlook that this gap is now affecting nearly every business, because – whether they are large or small, b2b or consumer-focused, manufacturers or service providers – they all rely on technologies that require technical, digital and creative skills.

The result is a skills and training landscape that is at best haphazard. There is patchy knowledge of what’s best practice. The training that is available is often stuck five years in the past, and when it comes to digital technology, that’s easily feels like a lifetime away.

Lifelong learning has often been hailed as a solution for this problem. True, but what does this learning actually entail: Watching a few YouTube videos? Gaining a software certification? Learning that is quickly crowded out by the day job and done like snacking, on-the-go?

A new apprenticeship ecosystem

So, as we discuss the future of work, I believe that it’s worth our time to take a look at modern apprenticeship systems and check which elements can be adapted for the modern workplace.

Companies especially are likely to benefit from a more structured approach that combines cutting-edge learning with the workplace. And they don’t have to build these structures all by themselves. Industry partners, or companies that are part of the same value chain could join forces to both set standards and pool resources. Take our training centre in Berlin, Germany, where we are partnering with 150 companies from across the region to give hundreds of students and apprentices highly specialist skills and the opportunity to work with the most modern machinery and robotics solutions.

What if we – and companies across many different industries – expand this apprenticeship ecosystem and offer this approach to training not just to people at the start of their career, but as an integral part of their career development?

Sure, it’s an investment, but it will pay back many times over – through workers that recognize that their skill sets are future proof, through a business that can always be at the leading edge of technology, and, more broadly, with industries that are infused with a learning mindset that is bound to take innovation to the next level. And make no mistake: Older employees who are in their 50s are just as eager to learn as the younger ones.

Undoubtedly, this past year has been challenging for all of us. So, as you look back, and then look ahead to 2022, pondering your New Year’s resolutions, why don’t you put this at the top of your list: Join me and become an apprentice. Get your learning journey going. For yourself, and for your business.?