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The historical development of Switzerland’s collective skill formation system is strongly interrelated with the structure and overall trajectory of the country’s political economic system. From early industrialization until the present, cleavages have existed not only between the federal state and the cantons, between the representatives of employers and the labor force but also between different factions of the key stakeholders in the political economy (i.e., employers’ associations, labor movement, and political parties). As a consequence, educational stakeholders and the federal administration have played a key role in the development of the skill system. In this context, apprenticeship training has continued to be a widely accepted model of skills provision and thus to form the core of the Swiss vocational education and training (VET) system. Nevertheless, this system has been adapted in recent years to ensure that more general and academic skills are being provided.

Until fairly recently little was known about trends in intergenerational social mobility in Switzerland and the mediating role of education in this process. With lasting high standards of living, big shares of vocational education and training (VET), and wide development of tertiary sector, Switzerland constitutes an interesting case to test modernization theory. Yet this analysis, drawn from a tailor-made dataset constructed from nineteen surveys representative of the Swiss population and collected between 1975 and 2013, leads us to reject expectations from this theory. While educational reforms have contributed to increase access to postcompulsory education, the influence of social background on educational attainment and on occupational destiny has not substantially declined throughout the twentieth century in Switzerland. In light of all this, and despite its economic prosperity and its high standards of living, Switzerland remains far from being a social mobility El Dorado.

This chapter describes the youth labor market and identifies the key institutions responsible for the smooth functioning of this market. It provides a theoretical framework for the rest of the chapters using perspectives used in cultural economics, sociology and political science. After a brief description of the German dual system and the American ‘freewheeling entrepreneurship’ approach, the chapter lays out the question of whether the American free market capitalism characterized by risk taking or the more scripted and coordinated approaches practiced in Germany distinguished by a high level of trust and cooperation among market actors can help other countries, specifically the Southern Mediterranean countries, in shaping their youth employment initiatives. The chapter concludes with a description of the organization of the rest of the book.

This chapter, written by Maurizio Caserta, Livio Ferrante, Radha Jagannathan and Simona Monteleone, takes a labor economics perspective to paint a portrait of Italian youth, especially in the Mezzogiorno, detailing their labor market preparation, prospects, and outcomes. After providing an in-depth look at the nature and magnitude of youth unemployment in the southern region of Italy in comparison to the rest of the country and the continent, it explores the contributions of the great recession, human capital development, and labor market coordination with the educational sector and resultant skills (mis)match, to existing high levels of youth disengagement. It is argued here that while the free-market principle uses the price mechanism to bring labor supply and demand to equilibrium levels, the segmentation of the Italian labor market, segregated along skill lines and by region, works against the efficiency of price-driven principles. After presenting some empirical evidence about prevailing values on work among youth, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential success of adopting an American or a German approach to youth employment initiatives in light of Italy’s historical and cultural legacies.

The chapter authors Jose Luis Arco-Tirado, Francisco D. Fernández-Martín, and Radha Jagannathan take an empirical perspective to the chronically high youth unemployment in Spain and provide details on its correlates. After a review of comparative unemployment statistics for youth in Spain and in the EU, the chapter presents a historical record of the reforms Spain implemented in its education and vocational systems and whether these reforms have been effective. It then undertakes a review of the active labor market policies aimed at skills activation and skills matching that Spain implemented immediately following the great recession under the Youth Guarantee program, and provides a discussion on whether these efforts have been productive. The chapter concludes with (a) a comparison of the existing VET system with the German apprenticeship model and the barriers that need to be overcome before the latter can fully be transplanted in Spain, and (b) some final thoughts on the paradoxical nature of the data on entrepreneurship gleaned from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM).

This chapter describes the reform of vocational education and assesses its consequences for the position of young people in the labour market. It highlights institutional differences in the way VET systems are organized. The chapter introduces the debate on vocational education in the Netherlands. It then describes the changes before turning to an examination of the consequences of the new system, as far as they are made visible in some recent Dutch studies. Lastly, the results from the comparative perspective introduced at the beginning of the chapter are summarized.

Along with rapid output growth, structural changes are occurring in the economy. This chapter discusses those structural changes, and in the light these changes, estimates skill development needs for 2022 at a much lower level than the government’s incredible number of 500 million. However, it argues that the challenge still remains daunting.

This chapter has two objectives. It describes the VET system in the country, pointing out how narrow is its coverage and limited its reach. It also presents the sampling method used and the tools of the three sets of surveys of institutions, trainees, and employers.

The chapter profiles the enterprises in terms of size, by ownership (private or public), and so on. It is based mainly on findings from the primary survey of employing enterprises that took ITI trainees or apprentices (in accordance with the legal requirements of the Apprentices Act, 1961). It shows that employers are dissatisfied with the competency level of trainees and presents their suggestions for improvements based on the survey.

Based on the findings of the book, as well as the literature reviewed for the book, this chapter presents a reform agenda for improving the employability of the products of the VET system. It not only presents specific proposals for ITIs and the apprenticeship system, but goes beyond such specific institutions, and makes radical suggestions to expand coverage and improve quality by reforming the entire eco-system for skills development in India.

Neuropsychologists are increasingly being asked to determine whether a patient can return to work, classroom, or play (e.g., sports). A difficulty for the neuropsychological assessment of cognitive functioning is that patients’ performance on a cognitive test may have little or no predictive value for how they may perform in a real-world situation (Burgess, Alderman, Evans, Emslie, & Wilson, 1998; Chaytor, Schmitter-Edgecombe, & Burr, 2006). To address this issue, neuropsychologists are increasingly emphasizing the need for tasks that represent real-world func­tioning and that tap into a number of executive domains (Chaytor & Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2003; Jurado & Rosselli, 2007). Burgess and colleagues (2006) argue that the majority of neuropsychological assessments currently in use today were developed to assess abstract cognitive “constructs” without regard for their ability to predict “functional” behavior. For example, although the construct-driven Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is one of the most widely used measures of executive function, it was not originally developed as a measure of executive functioning. Instead, the WCST was preceded by a number of sorting measures that were developed from observations of the effects of brain damage (e.g., Weigl, 1927). While Milner (1963) found that patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions had greater difficulty on the WCST than patients with orbitofrontal or nonfrontal lesions, other studies have shown that patients with frontal lobe pathology do not always differ from control subjects on the WCST (Stuss et al., 1983). Some may argue that while there have been some inconsistencies in the literature, data from the construct-driven WCST do appear to provide information relevant to the constructs of set shifting and working memory. However, it can also be argued that the data do not necessarily offer information that would allow a neuropsychologist to predict what situations in everyday life require the abilities that the WCST measures. A number of investigators have argued that performance on traditional tests has little correspondence to everyday activities of daily living. This can leave the neuropsychologist uncertain of the efficacy of the tests for predicting the way in which patients will manage in their everyday lives (Bottari, Dassa, Rainville, & Dutil, 2009; Manchester, Priestly, & Howard, 2004; Sbordone, 2008).