What do school grades say about professional success?

School grades are an emotional topic. Not only for students and parents, but also for politics. In July, Swisscom provided new material for the grades debate. The group announced something surprising: “Anyone who applies to Swisscom for an apprenticeship no longer has to submit a school certificate.” An application dossier is also no longer required. Instead, all applicants should first answer questions in a video tool. Only on the basis of these answers are selected candidates then invited to a company event for the next selection round. The system should initially be used as a test for all apprenticeships in German-speaking Switzerland.

In contrast to some commercial enterprises, Swisscom has not suffered from a lack of applicants: According to the company, around 8,000 applications have been received for 250 apprenticeships in recent years. Nevertheless, Swisscom emphasizes: “We don’t want talent to slip through our fingers.” The company questions the meaningfulness of school grades and written application dossiers. The school grades are often not comparable, and the same applies to the application dossiers due to differences in the extent of parental support.

special case?

The fact that school grades are far from showing everything has long been hardly disputed. But it is a big step from treating school grades as one of various selection criteria to doing without them altogether. One could draw the following conclusion from Swisscom’s announcement: From the company’s point of view, elementary school does not (any longer) teach a relevant basic framework for professional life – or at least the school is not able to measure the extent to which the relevant basic framework is in place.

But Swisscom does not want its project to be understood as criticism of the elementary school. Rather, the “special situation” of the company is decisive for the decision. In addition to the high number of applicants, Swisscom means its training model, “in which the trainees search for and put together their assignments themselves on an internal project marketplace” – which is why a lot of initiative is required from those affected.

The Swisscom training model and its development opportunities received a lot of praise from the educational researcher Ursula Renold from ETH Zurich. In general, according to Renold, cross-company “soft” employee qualities such as problem-solving skills, initiative, social skills and perseverance have gained in importance for employers. The question is to what extent school grades indicate such competencies.

According to its own statements, Swisscom has not carried out any statistical analyzes of the connection between grades in elementary school and later professional performance of its apprentices. However, past surveys of employers and careers advisors have often shown considerable doubts about the significance of school grades. A core criticism: the strictness of grading is not the same in every school, and within schools there are also differences between individual teachers. In addition, school grades only cover some factors relevant in working life, such as social skills, initiative and creativity, to a very limited extent or not at all. According to skeptics, the grades also reflect school performance at an often difficult age between 13 and 15 and say little about the potential of those affected in later professional life.

However, it is unclear whether the grades should be completely ignored on this basis. The grades could give certain indications of professionally relevant skills such as diligence, perseverance and analytical thinking. In addition, grades in elementary school can be meaningful for performance in vocational school and thus also for the success of the apprenticeship. And with averages of grades from several subjects and teachers, the differences between the individual teachers may even out to a certain extent. In addition, grades give the students “timely and rapid feedback and can therefore have a positive effect on their motivation to learn,” says Stefan Wolter, Director of the Swiss Coordination Center for Educational Research in Aarau. And if you don’t use school grades as a selection criterion, you first have to find a better alternative.

Ultimately, the connection between primary school grades and later success in vocational training can only be clarified on the basis of practical studies. “There are hardly any new representative studies on this for Switzerland,” says Stefan Wolter. In 2010, the master thesis by Michael Siegenthaler, who today works as a labor market expert at the Economic Research Center of ETH Zurich. The image is streaked. The research includes broad criticism of the grading as well as findings on a “high” predictive value of school grades with regard to training and labor market success.

In his own study of 300 Migros apprentices, Siegenthaler came to the conclusion that grades in elementary school had a certain predictive power for the apprenticeship (measured in terms of grades in vocational school, the rate of apprenticeship dropouts and unexcused absences from vocational school). The Multicheck aptitude test used by some companies for the purpose of standardization no longer showed any additional prognosis value after taking the elementary school grades into account. However, the study does not allow for a conclusive finding.

What the companies are doing

Measured by surveys and targeted queries to exponents, employers sometimes deal very differently with school grades when selecting apprentices. Here are some trends. First: In large companies with many applicants and relatively demanding apprenticeship positions, poor school grades often serve as one of the first exclusion criteria in order to keep the selection effort within bounds. Second: Smaller companies with only a few apprenticeship places and few candidates also look at candidates with poorer certificates and often rely primarily on trial apprenticeships. But even SMEs do not want apprentices with very bad school grades, because otherwise the risk of problems at vocational school and thus the risk of dropping out of an apprenticeship increases.

Third: Some companies use external standardized aptitude tests such as Multicheck to supplement the school reports. According to a survey of around 5,700 companies by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training for the 2016/17 apprenticeship year, 38 percent of all companies used external aptitude tests, and more than half used external and/or their own aptitude tests. In larger companies, these rates are significantly higher. Fourth, employers hope that the school requirement profiles give the elementary schools guidelines for curbing the variety in the severity of grades for the various professions in the future. And fifth: Loud calls for the abolition of school grades cannot be heard from employers.