**1. Introduction**

Historically, the institution of apprenticeship was quite universally embedded as a kind of "natural" education and training practice in craft production systems for centuries [1, 2]. Besides its socializing functions, this institution played important roles in the regulation and steering of access to established formalized occupational systems. Schools have evolved in parallel, first organized by religious institutions, later taken over by (national) states, to provide more general educational functions beyond preparation for work and occupations. From early times apprenticeships have been complemented by some kind of schooling (Sunday schools) for general and/or religious education. With the emergence of a conceptual and ideological linkage of school education with the ideas of universal human education and with the academic systems of universities a fundamental division and contrasting juxtaposition between general and vocational education has been established that still prevails at the background of discourses around education policies.

A main step towards bridging this division was ideas in German vocational pedagogy of combining school with apprenticeship in the 1920s (with e.g., Eduard Spranger, or Georg Kerschensteiner as pioneers [3, 4]), followed by strong legal regulations of the dual apprenticeship systems in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in the 1960s that established complex systems of regulations of occupations and industrial relations, combined with part-time compulsory vocational schools. A byproduct of these regulations was the emergence of multi-level, multi-stakeholder governance systems that combined various actors from the economy and the state in kinds of collective skills formation [5].

However, the discoveries of the emergence of the service society and the technical-scientific revolutions in production during the 1960s and 1970s have shifted political and conceptual attention towards general academic and higher education. The division between vocational and academic education was reinforced, and early vocational education at the upper secondary level came under scrutiny – the production of technical and scientific personnel emerged as a common priority. For decades, the dual apprenticeship system shifted into a defensive position, under the fear of hindering young people's access to upper-level competencies. It was only inspired by the increased national and international attention to youth employment problems and unemployment challenges from the 1980s onward that the potentials of apprenticeship for the youth labor market were gradually rediscovered at a broader scale. It lasted some further decades, till the 2000s, that proposals for kinds of dual apprenticeship became a political priority again, inspired by the discovery of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Group of Twenty (G20) countries that Germany as a paradigmatic dual apprenticeship country showed more favorable figures at the youth labor market (see the documentation of recent political interest and commitment in apprenticeships in [6]).

Despite the promising impact of vocational education on youth employment and the youth labor market, the political priorities about the "right mix" in the provision of education distributed between early vocational and higher education remain heavily disputed. The fear that talent might be guided into a dead-end of early practical training cut-off from further career opportunities towards broader education is a main adverse issue to apprenticeship. "A commonly held view is that work-based learning (WBL) schemes, such as apprenticeships, impose a glass ceiling on career progression. … Apprenticeship, in many countries, is perceived to be for poorly performing students and school drop-outs" ([7], p. 1). To counter this challenge steps of upgrading parts of apprenticeship are reported, "countries such as Australia, Germany, India, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States have started to expand apprenticeships at the higher education level" ([7], p. 16).

Two further questions about the role and impact of upper secondary VET and apprenticeship have been raised in research, first whether the short-term advantage in youth employment might be in fact related to longer-term disadvantage because of the acquisition of too narrow competencies for longer-term progression and demands (see

#### *Perspective Chapter: Sustaining Dual Apprenticeship Systems – Similarities and Differences... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112561*

[8]), and second, whether a focus on secondary level vocational education might restrain the urgent development of science-technology-oriented innovation as the main source of growth in new growth theory [9, 10]. The latter issue of promoting science-technology innovation via the expansion and upgrading of higher education vs. secondary vocational education has triggered quite aggressive discourses against the academic upgrading policy in Switzerland and Germany (catchwords are "academic trap", or "academic delusion").

This chapter provides some exploration of structural and performance-related aspects in the three paradigmatic apprenticeship countries, looking at differences concerning key aspects of apprenticeship policy behind a similar basic structure. Four research questions are explored through comparative data, first, whether the international data indicate influences of VET on the education structure through limiting participation in tertiary education or reducing exclusion towards low-level education; second, whether comparative data reinforce a reduction of youth unemployment through established apprenticeship systems; third, whether the employment relation in apprenticeship leads to a stronger involvement of labor market policy for young people; and fourth, how apprenticeship is positioned in the progression of educational pathways between upper secondary and tertiary education.

The recent 2019 Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training [11] justifies the prominent role of the three selected countries as paradigmatic apprenticeship countries by mentioning them several times in various chapters as a kind of *trilogy* of fully developed dual apprenticeship systems. Germany is by far the most mentioned country in the handbook (281 hits), and Switzerland and Austria are very often mentioned together in connection with the trilogy (overall a smaller number of hits of 75 and 31; out of the mentions in text forty to sixty percent of mentions are in directly combined phrases of all the three trilogy countries). Overall, the perspectives of dual apprenticeship are appreciated quite skeptically, with tertiarization and hybridization being important competing trends, and transfer to other countries being difficult [12, 13].
