Authored by Kelly Vedi, Senior Director, Policy Global Policy and External Relations for College Board

What does it take to build career education that works at scale, not just for some students, in some places, some of the time?  College Board serves nearly seven million students each year in nearly every U.S. high school. As we embark on career-connected learning at scale, we wanted to see what’s possible.

This past June, College Board traveled to Switzerland to look at one of the most effective vocational education systems in the world. We joined a delegation of healthcare leaders from Indiana, Colorado, and New York organized by CareerWise and the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation.

Over four days, we learned that for education to reliably prepare young people for skilled careers two things must be true: industries need to agree on their entry-level talentneeds, and employers need to play a role in training early career talent.

In Switzerland, apprenticeships are high school

Youth unemployment in Switzerland currently sits under 3% versus just over 9% in the U.S. How do they achieve this? It’s thanks to how the Swiss have built their version of high school.

About 70% of Swiss youth complete high school through an apprenticeship: three years employed by a company, splitting their week between work and school. Three days a week, they learn on the job. Two days a week, they’re in the classroom, studying the academic knowledge needed for their trade alongside civics, personal finance, and sports.

Clearly, apprentices are well-prepared for the workplace. But what about higher education? This is where the Swiss system really shines. Youngsters (a term our Swiss hosts frequently used) who want to go on to university after their apprenticeship have a way to get there. The Swiss created a bridge program, which is a year of prep courses that can be taken during or after an apprenticeship. Once completed, students can gain entry into the Universities of Applied Science.

Too often, apprenticeships are framed as the alternative to college, but the Swiss model rejects that. The combination of rigorous preparation for skilled work, paired with a real path to continued education, is what makes the Swiss model worth studying.

Lesson 1: Students benefit when industry delivers a collective voice on early talent skills

As part of our trip, we visited the headquarters of OdA Gesundheit. OdA Gesundheit is one of Switzerland’s sector-specific “Organisationen der Arbeitswelt” (OdA), or Professional Associations — employer-led bodies that co-write the national curriculum for specific professions in an industry, in this case healthcare.

In the Swiss system, employers within a sector agree on what entry-level talent needs to know and be able to do. We hear often from American employers that they don’t have the bandwidth to do this kind of workforce development work themselves — they’re busy running their businesses. The Swiss model addresses this directly via the OdAs.

Instead of one-off partnerships between individual schools and individual businesses, the OdA works on behalf of all the employers in a sector. They work with their member companies to establish a shared understanding of the skills an occupation requires. That definition becomes the foundation for coursework, credentials, and assessments.

Without a shared definition, career education risks drifting away from the skills and knowledge companies actually need. It’s no surprise then that themajority of employers don’t view U.S. high school students as ready for entry-level jobs.

Lesson 2: Educators and employers can share responsibility for career-relevant skill development in high school

In a recent survey College Board ran with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, about 8 in 10 hiring managers noted they are more likely to hire entry-level talent with internship or work-study experience.

Swiss employers have internalized that value for decades. Workforce development isn’t handed to high schools to implement and own. Nearly 1 in 3 Swiss companies are training firms, employing teenagers as apprentices. For them, skill development isn’t a favor they do for the education system; it’s a core part of how they build the talent they need.

And for students, they get to learn by doing, in real environments, with real stakes. We saw this firsthand at the health delegation, where brave 17-year-old apprentices practiced their blood draws — on us!

When employers are invested early, it eliminates the question we hear far too often in U.S. classrooms: does what I’m learning in school actually matter?

A step forward for relevant learning

How do we bring these learnings back to America where industries are not as well-organized and employers are not used to collectively defining their shared talent needs? The good news is that several of the delegates are already doing it:

Indiana has designated BioCrossroads as its Healthcare Industry Talent Association — functionally, Indiana’s version of an OdA. This fall, BioCrossroads is launching a healthcare apprenticeship for high schoolers, with students starting in 10th grade, rotating through both patient care and functions like HR and revenue cycle management, and graduating with 2,500+ hours of healthcare-specific training against more than 40 industry-identified competencies.

Colorado Thrives, is bringing CEOs and business leaders together to organize a “demand signal” — pooling employer job needs and skill requirements across sectors, including healthcare, and building scaled partnerships with training providers to close the gap

In New York City, healthcare employers including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) will build a new talent pipeline in partnership with CareerWise and FutureReadyNYC for New York City Public Schools students.

Clearing a path for all students to own their future

For decades, the work of connecting high school to what comes next has centered on college. Under College Board’s leadership, millions of students complete AP Exams each year to earn college credit — a shared set of expectations between high schools and colleges nationwide. What’s possible when that same alignment extends to careers?

That’s the idea behind AP Career Kickstart. This fall, AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity courses will launch in classrooms nationwide, developed with K-12, higher education, and industry leaders to ensure employer input is part of the design. Completing a course provides the potential to earn credentials recognized by both higher education and employers so like in the Swiss model, students don’t have to choose between college or career before they’re ready. As we actively explore AP healthcare courses, we are likewise engaging industry from the start. Because the lesson from Switzerland is clear: coursework is only as good as the industry alignment behind it.

To further strengthen career connections last November, we announced a four-year partnership with CareerWise to link AP Career Kickstart coursework directly to CareerWise’s national apprenticeship network.

On the work-based learning piece: College Board is doing our part there too. We recently acquired Teamship. Teamship is a proven work-based learning program where small teams of students solve real problems for real businesses, building the durable skills students need for their futures. This expands College Board’s ability to deliver real-world, career-relevant learning experiences to students nationwide.

And this fall, College Board is welcoming two CareerWise apprentices to our New York City headquarters! It’s one small piece of a much bigger commitment: building the same clear paths to careers that we’ve spent a century building to college.