The Success of Apprenticeships

Foreword – ESSEC Business School: The Pioneering Spirit

True to its pioneering spirit, ESSEC was the first French business school to offer the apprenticeship pathway. This was 25 years ago, and this anniversary is an opportunity to recall all the topicality and relevance of this pedagogical model, which is constantly evolving to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Throughout this book, edited by two ESSEC professors, Jean-Marie Peretti and Jean-Luc Cerdin, you will find testimonies on the good practices developed through the long experience of the school, as well as very many contributions from teachers from other institutions around the world.

ESSEC introduced the notion of an apprenticeship in the early 1990s, offering its students this privileged link with companies and allowing students to benefit from a first experience of work, financing their schooling at the same time as providing a first salary. Today, ESSEC has a know-how unique in France, based on a quarter of a century of experience, 6,500 apprentices trained and a network of 1,200 partner companies.

To better measure what apprenticeships have brought as a pedagogical and social innovation in a major French business school, it is worth returning to the revolution that apprenticeships represented, after the first transformation that was the incorporation of internships in companies into ESSEC programs in the early 1970s. Internships in companies then, and today, consisted of shorter periods of up to six months. This ...