Ivanka Trump’s high-profile visit to Berlin last week generated a flood of news coverage after she defended U.S. President Donald Trump as a champion of women — particularly since she did so while speaking at an all-star woman panel entitled: “Inspiring Women: Scaling up Women’s Entrepreneurship.”  The visit received coverage for other reasons too, for example as a sign of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s skilled diplomacy in cultivating a powerful and sympathetic back channel to the new President.  An aspect of the trip that received less attention, however (at least in the American press), was Ivanka Trump’s focus on job training, and in particular her embrace of the German system of vocational training as a model for the United States.

After the conclusion of the briefly infamous W20 panel discussion at the Intercontinental Hotel — in a well-traveled touristic enclave of West Berlin — Ivanka was shuttled out toward Tegel Airport for a field trip at the Siemens Technik Akademie: a vocational training site for 1,300 apprentices (known in German as “Azubis”), operated by the industrial giant Siemens.  There, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser and German Minister of Education Johanna Wanka spent 45 minutes allowing Ivanka to meet some of the Azubis, and allowing them to show off their work (which included the coffee-brewing machine  in the image above).  

While this might have been Ivanka Trump’s first visit to a German vocational training site, she has been publicly talking about German job training for months.  During Chancellor Angela Merkel’s March 17 visit to Washington (her first during the Trump era), Ivanka helped arrange a roundtable discussion in the White House with U.S. and German business leaders, for the specific purpose of discussing vocational training. All of the participants used the opportunity to impress upon the new president the potential for German-style job training to flourish in the U.S., and four young people in U.S.-based apprenticeships at IBM, Siemens, Schlaeffer, and BMW, got a chance to testify about their training experiences.  A few days later, during a White House CEO Town Hall (her first appearance as a federal official), Ivanka again spoke about workforce training, noting that “the Germans have really led the way on this front.”  Two weeks later, in advance of her Berlin trip, Ivanka told the German press that she planned to use the visit to learn more about vocational training, stating: “there is a lot we can learn from Germany’s accomplishments.”  And during the W20 event itself, where the topics ranged across a spectrum of issues including equal-pay legislation, affordable child care, and economic empowerment of women, Ivanka was the only panelist out of eight to stress the role of “vocational education and skill-based training” as it impacts women and girls.            

So what makes the German system so widely admired, and could Ivanka Trump’s advocacy translate into educational reforms in the U.S.?  The first question is much easier to answer:  In Germany, school-aged kids are tracked from a young age and nudged into one of two tracks (vocational or academic).  Unlike in the United States, many German vocational schools are as prestigious as their academic counterparts.  Once on the vocational track, the German model marries classroom learning with paid work experience in a private company.  This allows the employers to train and test out prospective employees  (some of whom start training as early as age 16), in what amounts to a years-long job interview, before hiring them into permanent jobs.  Meanwhile, trainees are earning a wage while they learn their trade.  The system has roots that go back to the Middle Ages, and is thought to be responsible in part for the lowest youth unemployment rate in Europe.  While there is increasing recognition in the U.S. of the value of expanding such apprenticeship-style programs, in order to meet growing shortages of skilled workers (the Obama Administration also actively promoted apprenticeship training), the resources devoted to four-year colleges and universities dwarf the commitment to vocational training.  Nonetheless, this could be changing, as big players like Michael Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and many others, are working in concert to expand skills-based training in the United States.               

Turning to the second question of Ivanka Trump’s advocacy, what will it lead to?  One German commentator from Süddeutsche Zeitung wondered aloud whether the Siemens visit would translate into something tangible, or whether it was just an opportunity for publicity.  It is probably too early to say definitively.  This very unconventional Administration is still only 100 days old, and Ivanka Trump became an official White House advisor only a month ago.  So far, the Administration has not proposed concrete steps or dollars for job training. Perhaps that will change when the FY2018 budget request is unveiled during the week of May 22.  In addition, the White House is supposedly mulling over a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which would be a natural vehicle to boost skills-based training (maybe President Trump could establish a pathway for Congress to embrace Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s wish that the U.S. set “a moonshot goal to create 5 million apprenticeships in the next five years”).  However, all this will require Ivanka Trump and the White House to move beyond marketing, and into action.