Curricula constitute one factor that determines apprentices' opportunities to learn and develop competences.
Apprentices' opportunities to engage in activities and interact with more skilled co-workers make development of vocational competencies possible.
To assess the Swiss apprentices' opportunities to develop 'commercial competence' in the three main computer-based tasks of (1) sales, (2) purchases, and (3) production, we analyzed the curricula from the Swiss common commercial vocational schools and the branch-specific companies.
Therefore, apprentices need opportunities for active, productive participation in work processes, rather than just taking observational roles or performing isolated, monotonous work.
This denies the apprentice the opportunity to work in important working situations and hinders the apprentice's learning of more complex and demanding tasks relevant to the development of expertise (Nielsen 2008; Savoie-Zajc and Dolbec 2003).
Thus, whereas our first hypothesis compared the vocational identity of apprentices undergoing dual vocational versus school-based training, our second hypothesis relates solely to dual vocational apprentices, who have opportunities to experience real-life work, to predict how these experiences influence their workplace identity.
It may be that a degree of labour market mobility needs to be sacrificed if apprenticeships are to taken up by many more employers than currently but this may be partially offset by employers offering their ex-apprentices further training opportunities and progression within the business, too.
Finally, small companies are on average less attractive for potential (qualified) apprentices than large firms: First, small firms can offer fewer career opportunities for apprentices, and second, small firms typically offer lower apprentice pay (because of the lower pay level in small companies in general).
Agent-identification heuristics may also provide the novice tracker with opportunities for "apprentice learning" in Sterelny's (2012) sense: the cross-generational and cooperative transmission of environmental knowledge and social norms by expert agents to agents with less expertise.
It has already been noted that opportunities to apprentice City children within the parish were probably limited by guild restrictions, while a failure of local industry to provide sufficient employment opportunities and a desire to ensure settlement elsewhere probably also played a part.
