Indiana Looks to Swiss Experts to Create Thousands of  Student Apprenticeships

Indiana officials have turned to experts at the Swiss version of MIT for help becoming a national career training leader by making apprenticeships available to thousands of high school students across the state.

Indiana is the latest state to work with ETH Zurich — where Albert Einstein once studied —  to develop ways to break down barriers between educators and business so that career training can be a large part of a reinvented high school experience.

Indiana government, business and education officials  — like those in Alabama, California, Colorado, Washington State, New York City and Washington, D.C. — have spent the last few years working with Ursula Renold, the former head of the Swiss vocational system.

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Now a professor at ETH, Renold’s highly-regarded Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems, known as CEMETS, earns rave reviews and advises companies and officials around the world.

A broad Indiana coalition including legislators, the state community college Ivy Tech, the Indiana Department of Education and Indiana Chamber of Commerce have visited Switzerland under CEMETS’ direction. Committees of executives from several industries have also taken trips to see Swiss companies and schools in their field.

The coalition expects to release a statewide plan to expand youth apprenticeships — potentially from 500 today to 50,000 in 10 years  — in September.

“College, of course, is very important, and it will continue to be important,” said Claire Fiddian-Green, President and CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, which has paid for and is leading some of the work. “But we know that it’s not serving the majority of students in Indiana today.”

“We are trying to grow another great pathway that allows for upward mobility for young people in our state and also meets the demand for skilled labor that employers have been struggling to find for a long time,” she said.

That vision includes creating thousands of apprenticeships in fields such as health care, manufacturing and information technology, which are common in Europe. Such apprenticeships would add to the more traditional ones in the U.S. in the construction trades.

Among potential changes coming to Indiana based on the Swiss system are letting 11th and 12th graders work part time while attending school part time; and letting businesses have a say in which work skills schools teach students.

The plan will likely call for high school students to receive credit toward graduation from their work and training experiences, a change already being discussed at the department of education as it debates new diploma requirements.

Indiana already has a pilot Modern Youth Apprenticeship Program that started in 2021 to let high school juniors and seniors earn money working in businesses, such as AES Indiana and pharmaceutical company Roche, through their first year in college. Nearly 500 students have worked as apprentices in the three-year program.

That program will soon expand to four other communities across the state, but officials want to grow it even more.

“We’ve really kind of hit the accelerator,” said Robert Behning, the Indiana House education committee chairman.

Annelies Goger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who researches career training, has traveled to Switzerland with Indiana officials for research on how the state, along with Colorado and Alabama, is breaking ground in trying to bring apprenticeships to a large scale.

“I am struck by the level of cohesion and shared vision in the state across many of the key leaders in workforce, education, the legislature, and the chamber,” Goger said. “CEMETS has played a critical role in creating the space and time for these leaders to work together and align around how they plan to tackle several challenges with student success.”

The top challenges the Indiana coalition has identified and are looking to Renold and the Swiss for solutions include high school class schedules that interfere with work, a lack of public transportation for students to get to jobs without a car, and businesses’ willingness to train large numbers of students — not just a few as a charity effort.

Perhaps the biggest will be having competitors in each field partner to find common skills they all want new employees to have, so apprentices can train for an entire industry, not just a single employer.

The Swiss have solved many of these issues, at least to a far greater degree than the U.S. About two thirds of students in Switzerland participate in apprenticeships as part of their education. Though attending university can still be the most prestigious path, apprenticeships are respected and are often combined with college by students who want both theoretical and practical training.

The Swiss also have no reluctance in having high-school age students as apprentices as Indiana is considering. Many Swiss apprenticeships start as early as age 15, not after high school when most start in the U.S. Swiss companies view working with young people as a chance to attract new talent, not the risk and bother many American companies do.

The Swiss system also gives companies a say in what skills schools teach in return for taking on responsibility and the expense of co-training teenagers.

Fiddian-Green said she was sold on the potential of Indiana schools and businesses cooperating to help students and themselves after attending a summer seminar in 2019 that CEMETS runs every year. Teams from around the world spend the week of the seminar  touring businesses and schools, then work with Renold’s staff to try and better grow training programs back home.

Fiddian-Green said visiting training centers that Swiss businesses create just for young people and seeing how competing companies can agree on what students need to be taught to succeed in that industry, not just their own company, was eye-opening.

“You start to have light bulbs go off after you’ve been there about three days, because it all starts to kind of click together,” she said.

Noel Ginsburg, the Colorado businessman who created the CareerWise youth apprenticeship program in Colorado in 2016 had a similar experience. He credits Renold and the CEMETS summer seminar with showing him how apprenticeships succeed for so many students and  inspiring CareerWise, which has served nearly 2,200 apprentices.

“It’s the combination of the theoretical that you learn in the classroom, where there’s discussion, but then you see it at scale, which is why CEMETS is powerful,” Ginsburg told The 74.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and his wife Judith are also fans of Renold, CEMETS and the Swiss system after Renold and staff took them to businesses and schools to see it in person. Chase now hires CareerWise apprentices in its New York City offices and is an outspoken backer of CareerWise expansion in that city.

Judi Dimon told The 74 she was impressed with how engaged Swiss apprentices were, even those still of high school age. And she saw how seriously companies took apprenticeships as a recruiting and talent pipeline strategy, not a charity program as many youth training programs are.

“It was not… a corporate responsibility project that is paid for by the (company) foundation,” Dimon said. “It is core to the businesses themselves, and to the culture and to their ability to attract young talent.”

That shift of viewing high school work experiences as a real business strategy and not just a public relations effort is cited by many experts as crucial to expanding high school internships or apprenticeships to a large scale anywhere in the U.S., not just Indiana.

Making a return on investment case to businesses is one of the key issues that Indiana teams have been working on with CEMETS staff.

Others include adapting high school schedules so that students can fit in real work time, perhaps by having some days of only work and some devoted to school as in Switzerland.

The state also wants each industry to develop standards for what employees should know across many companies, so that training can be common across an industry. Having committees of competitors from Indiana building a plan together with CEMETS is a step toward the industry associations that determine training in Switzerland.

“Those associations actually create a curriculum with input from the education system,” Fiddian-Green said. “That’s a huge critical function that makes it possible for employers to engage in apprenticeship, and that’s what we don’t have in Indiana.”