Master craftspersons in Europe: elevated in education policy but endangered as a stabilising anchor?
Friedrich Hubert Esser
Dear readers,
The master craftspersons' award ceremony held by the Dortmund Chamber of Skilled Crafts a few weeks ago was a special day of celebration for vocational education and training. For the first time, the master craftsperson's certificates awarded were assigned to Level 6 of the German national qualifications framework (DQR) and the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). In her speech at the ceremony, German Minister of Education Johanna Wanka spoke of an education-policy milestone. She emphasised that pressure from Europe must not be allowed to undermine German master craftsperson's certificates and dual system apprenticeships. Ultimately the vast majority of apprentices in the skilled crafts receive their training in occupations where a master craftsperson qualification is a prerequisite of business ownership and the right to train apprentices. The background to this is the EU Commission's initiative to review existing regulations on access to occupations in the Member States. To the consternation of the skilled crafts sector, this may call the master craftsperson prerequisite into question.
The cautionary forewarnings are justified!
A recent study by the Institute for SMEs and the Skilled Crafts at the University of Göttingen shows that the abolition in 2004 of the requirement for a master craftsperson's certificate in a range of skilled craft occupations is having a negative impact on the willingness to offer apprenticeships and on the stability of self-employed businesses.
The Göttingen researchers find that skilled crafts workers without a master craftsperson's certificate offer considerably fewer apprenticeships than certified master craftspersons. Prior to 2004, 20 percent of self-employed business owners in the relevant crafts provided training; today the figure is only three percent, according to the study. Moreover, over half of new businesses founded by owners without a master craftsperson's certificate had vanished from the market five years later. So the deregulation of the skilled crafts that has happened so far is not contributing to greater stability.
Quite the opposite: the decline in training effort harms not only the skilled crafts but also other sectors of the economy in equal measure. For skilled-craft journeymen and journeywomen are sought-after skilled workers in industrial companies, too, and are therefore in demand! Certified master craftspersons are not just qualified to start their own businesses; along with their craft, they master a complex field of knowledge.
Their qualifications encompass detailed, trade-specific knowledge and skills and the ability to continuously integrate the most recent advances in knowledge into their own qualification profile. Added to that are the health and safety precautions which are of vital importance to autonomous work in the skilled crafts.
Master craftsperson's qualification: guarantor of high quality initial vocational training
Today's modern master craftsperson examination regulations place the accent on the personality of the entrepreneur who takes personal responsibility for steering business processes. It is necessary to master design, costing, planning, conception and calculation of customer orders as well as production techniques and creative execution to meet the given quality standards. The days when master craftsperson examinations focused mainly on the "masterpiece" are long gone.
Hence, the master craftsperson's certificate is also a guarantor of high-quality vocational apprenticeships in Germany because part of the final examination is the trainers' examination, which helps to perpetuate the German dual system for the future.
Ultimately, all this facilitates the necessary standards of initial and advanced vocational training and, combined with professional experience, produces a level of competence equivalent to a university degree. For exactly that reason, the master craftsperson's qualification is assigned to Level 6 of the German national qualifications framework (DQR) and the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), the same level as the academic Bachelor qualification. Master craftspersons remain important anchors of stability for Germany's industrial base, which must be safeguarded come what may - even from the envious eyes of the EU, if need be!
BWP-online: www.bwp-journal.de
FRIEDRICH HUBERT ESSER
Professor Dr., President of the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, Bonn
Translation from the German original (published in BWP 2/2014): Deborah Shannon, Academic Text & Translation, Berlin