Standardized curricula define the set of skills that must be trained within a training occupation and thus are a key regulatory element of apprenticeship systems. Although clear economic rationales support the usage of such curricula, they necessarily impose costs, especially on firms that train apprentices, but do not use the full set of skills in their productive process and/or train other skills that are not covered by the curriculum. In this paper, we identify the trade-offs involved in setting up training curricula and use data from the most recent survey on the costs and benefits of apprenticeship training among Swiss firms to quantify the associated costs to training firms. On average, training firms state that they do not use 17% of the training content prescribed by the relevant curriculum, and 11% of the companies train additional skills not covered by the curriculum. We show that both kinds of misfit are associated with higher training costs and lower productive output from apprentices. This shows that the regulator imposes costs on firms in order to guarantee broad skills development for apprentices. It also cautions against overly broad curricula that may impose disproportionate costs on firms.

标准化课程定义了培训职业中必须培训的技能，因此是学徒制度的关键监管要素。尽管明确的经济原理支持使用此类课程，但它们必然会增加成本，特别是对于培训学徒但在生产过程中不使用全套技能和/或培训课程未涵盖的其他技能的公司而言。在本文中，我们确定了制定培训课程所涉及的权衡，并使用瑞士公司学徒培训成本和收益的最新调查数据来量化培训公司的相关成本。平均而言，培训公司表示他们没有使用相关课程规定的培训内容的17%，还有11%的公司培训课程未涵盖的额外技能。我们表明，这两种不适应都与较高的培训成本和较低的学徒产出有关。这表明监管机构向企业强加成本，以保证学徒的广泛技能发展。它还警告不要提供过于宽泛的课程，因为这可能会给企业带来不成比例的成本。