I touched on this broader skills agenda at the end of my opening remarks, and I want to thank Mr. Armstrong for having joined me on our European skills mission in March, which included almost all the major Canadian business organizations, some of our larger unions, many folks from our post-secondary sector, and representatives of several provincial governments as we spent three and a half days studying the German dual vocational training system and a couple of days studying the reformed apprenticeship and trades training system in the United Kingdom.
It was, I think, a phenomenal eye-opener for all of us to see how those systems are getting radically better outcomes. In the Germanic-European systems, by which I mean those of Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and to some extent the Netherlands, young people in secondary school are actively encouraged to develop interests in particular occupations, trades, and they're often encouraged when they're 14 or 15 to do brief stints of a week or two on work sites to get a tactile sense of what different occupations are like.
Then typically when they're 16, two-thirds of the kids in those systems go into paid apprenticeship trade programs. On average they're paid modestly, about a thousand euros a month, because most of them are teenagers still living with mom and dad. So they don't have a lot of living expenses but they are paid something, and typically, they spend three to four days in practical learning on the work site, and then one to two days of the same week of theoretical training at a berufskolleg, a vocational college.
The practical and the theoretical learning are perfectly integrated. There is a totally seamless connection between the employers and the colleges in the development of the programs. The phenomenal thing is that typically these trade programs in the Germanic system take three years, which means two-thirds of youth in those countries at roughly the age of 19 get a trade certificate, which according to everyone in those countries is regarded as having the same esteem and value as a university degree, and 95% of those youth are then hired in the occupations for which they were trained and are now certified.
Of course, many of them then take part-time additional post-secondary studies or they eventually go on and perhaps get degrees, often at co-op universities, which are also integrated with employers. They're not just sitting in a classroom; they're also often indentured or attached to an employer.
These results are phenomenal. This is why those Germanic countries have youth unemployment rates that are roughly half of what ours is. I believe, Mr. Armstrong, that in Switzerland, the youth unemployment rate is about 3% versus 12% in Canada.
The average graduation age for trade certificate holders in Germany is 19 versus, according to the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum, 28 in Canada, and those 28-year-olds are a lot of young people who did what their high school counsellors and parents told them to do. They went to university. They got the degree. They were encumbered by the debt and too many of them found themselves unable to find employment in the fields for which they obtained their degrees, ended up in the service economy or at the bottom of the labour market, frustrated, carrying debt, until they decided to go back to college or into an apprenticeship program.
What I'm trying to say is we cannot perfectly replicate the Germanic system here but we can try to drive toward their sense of the parity of esteem between trades and professions, apprenticeships, and universities. We can ask our employers to emulate the deep financial commitment of European employers to trades, training, and apprenticeships, and all of us should be encouraged, especially from the secondary schools, on a kind of recreation of this idea of experiential learning and vocational training.