Comparison Apprenticeship – ECTS
November 14, 2024 2024-12-11 7:19Comparison Apprenticeship – ECTS
Comparison Apprenticeship – ECTS
Comparison between an Apprenticeship an ECTS-Credits
Trade school and inter-company courses
Blue and purple Boxes: Blue boxes are CS courses taught at the trade school. Each course consists of 40 lessons (=30 hours) at school as well as some additional hours of homework. A regular apprenticeship consists of 24 such courses, resulting in 720 hours in vocational training.
Yellow and orange Boxes: Yellow boxes are CS courses taught at inter-company courses. Each course takes up 40 hours. An apprenticeship consists of 7 such courses, resulting in additional 280 hours of vocational training.
White Boxes are «Advanced basic skills». These do not count towards ECTS-equivalent work as having these are prerequisites to being admitted to a university. At the same time these courses allow for a better comparison between CS courses in a University setting and an apprenticeship as they negate possible gaps in school education.
The student workload in trade school thus translates to a student workload of 1000 hours (homework not included), the equivalent of 33 ECTS points.
Work expirience
An apprenticeship requires work at a company. According to the Bildungsverordnung, a four year apprenticeship requires a minimum amount of work of 4928 hours. One quarter of this time can be assumed to be used to obtain skills and knowledge that is a prerequisite for starting a successfull academic career. Another quarter of this time an apprentice is expected to perform well rehearsed tasks that do not teach new skills. The remaining half oft he time (2464 hours) is expected to be time spent on advancing the apprentice’s skills and thus can be counted as equivalent to the workload of a student in academia.
Dividing the workload in hours by 30, the work experience can be estimated to be valued at 82 ECTS credits.
Comparison by expected income
Another method to compare the value of an Apprenticeship in term of ECTS Credits is to compare the expected income after completing the education. This comparison is done using the federal tool for income calculation (Calc) and entering the curriculum of a ficticious 20 year old person working 40 hours a week in Zürich.
The first row assumes the applicant only received job training by the hiring company. Typically these courses take 3 months at a workload of 40 hours a week. To keep this estimate conservative, such a training counts as 0 ECTS points.
The second row assumes the applicant finished an apprenticeship as a software engineer. The ECTS estimate is derived using a linear scale between the other two categories.
The third row assumes the applicant finished a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science worth at least 180 ECTS points.
International Competitions
Another means to compare the value of an apprenticeship to the education received from obtaining a Bachelor’s degree is to look at international competitions. The competitors Switzerland sends to the WorldSkills competitions are commonly students that are currently in an apprenticeship while other countries commonly send University students. Despite the supposed difference, the competitors from Switzerland are usually represented in the top 10. In the field «IT for business» Swiss apprentices have often obtained the gold medal.
This is evidence that at the top-level an apprenticeship can be of equal value to a full bachelor’s degree even tough it is different in character.
