Firms' training processes and their apprentices' education success

In many European countries, firms engage heavily in the training of apprentices. The literature has investigated why firms provide such training, but almost no empirical evidence exists on how firms train and shape their apprentices' education outcomes. We investigate this question by estimating a training production function with employer-employee linked data on more than 3,700 Swiss firms and their 9,500 apprentices. Using measures derived from work psychology, we test whether apprentices are more likely to successfully complete training in standard time when they are trained in firms with better training processes. We find that apprentices are more successful in firms that assign tasks that make them find own solutions and that are more varied. We find only weak evidence for the hypothesis that the association of good training processes and education success is due to the assortative matching of good apprentices with good firms. We further show that our results are robust to different model specifications and formal sensitivity tests, suggesting an important role of firms and their training processes for apprentices' education success.