Actually, you need University graduates who are educated in electronics both in theory and in practice.

Again, hard to find.

If you know any, let me know (seriously, via PM).

Tom

magic out of thin air ? You want to say that our teachers in professional schools came out of thin air ? They simply came from abroad. It will not take time to, it is IMPOSSIBLE to, for the simple reason that there is not sufficient young people around.

Take the Eiffel Tower. As it is, it looks like the age structure of countries like Egypt or Tunisia or Morocco. If you turn it upside down it looks like the age structure of Switzerland !!! THIS is the problem, and it in reality is not just a problem of Switzerland. It is a problem of most European countries. Even if Switzerland with its exceedingly high prices for lodgings is among the worst.

But look at Italy. Italy in the 1950ies had the reputation of a country with families with 6 to 10 children (at that time already history), but in the late 50ies early 60ies cities and towns and modern villages, at least north of the Livorno-Perugia line, saw the emergence of one-child or no-child families, saw the women going to work, and in the meantime, even Italy has become a so-called "negative-growth-country". And while the economy primarily takes place north of the Livorno-Perugia line and the national administration in Rome and the national misery in Napoli, the South sent so many young people to Svizzera, Francia, Alemania, Belgia etc that now even in the South, employers need foreigners to fill the gap. THIS is the reason why so many North Africans somewhere in between the coastlines and the "North" disappear (by physical appearance not different from the locals there). South Italian Prime Minister played along with the game but Milano orginating Silvio Berlusconi finds the Mezzogiorno game rather frustrating.

To put it into the words of Général Charles de Gaulle who dryly said when asked about why he was ready to give independence to Algeria "if we keep them inside the French Republic they before long will be the majority of this country". There are some who say that this will happen anyway but I think if so it will happen at a time when certain developments will be overcome. Proving that the General got things completely right

Unfortunately, your diagnosis is the same as the one of a cousin, who for decades worked at CERN and the University of Geneva, who told me that the Swiss universities were rubbish alltogether, NOT due to lacking standards or lacking infrastructure but due to idiotic methods looks as if W... K... got things correctly

You mean practical education don't you ?
There I agree....

But Tom how many manual mills are still in use ?

I would say you ALSO need University graduates of that kind. But NO, none of them is sitting around in cafés looking round for work. And as Swiss universities are, in contrast to US universities, not linked-up with regional industry, exactly your demand about "and in practice" is impossible to be satisfied.

So, to say it again, the problem, beside demographics, is not infrastructure or the number of "instructors" but methods and organisation

You always need them for one-offs, we still have one (and a lathe that is not 100% but close enough to make one-off motorcycle parts!).

Also, since our CNC machines are small (mainly for front-panels), all the serious stuff needs to be done on the manual mill.

Tom

Chicken & egg;
few youngsters = few courses.
few courses = few trained youngsters.

One issue in Switzerland is they expect local youngsters to do a sort of apprenticeship as part of their IT training course.
Who wants to spend so much time on zero or practically zero earnings?

another issue is that for youngsters, engineering is no longer as attractive as it once was. On the one hand we have the pundits saying that sooner or later its all going to be offshored anyway, so why go into a job without much future? On the other hand the pay and recognition is pretty measly compared to some other jobs you could be doing with the same brain power so where's the incentive gone? And from there it's a chicken and egg thing. Fewer locals doing IT -> more imported labour doing those jobs -> lower pay -> less attractive for locals -> and so the vicious circle continues.

...so what is a reliable source nowadays? and who defines that? and is he/she reliable...?

I mean, e.g. SVP got 30% of the votes, but they are most unreliable source there is...and still people buying their crap propaganda...

No source of news is entirely reliable and free of bias. So if you really want to understand what is happening you should get news from different sources and form your own opinion and filter out the bias as far as possible.

As Swissinfo tends to get cited as a source on EF about ten times more than all other sources together, I have to conclude that not everybody is doing that.

To be able to respect the forum rules, not many sites covers news from Switzerland entirely in English...so that's why people tend to use Swissinfo, but if you have any other more "reliable" news site please let us know...

No, the apprenticeship INCLUDES the IT training. And the result will be top earnings and not zero earnings. And in case of doubt better earnings than the theory-overloaded university folks, who find it difficult to turn their knowledge into practice. True, during apprenticeship, your earnings are low, but students have NO earnings.

I do not know why people think that all imported labor settles for less salary-wise then the local labor, this total nonsense when it comes academics...I know many Indians in Switzerland and they have same or more as the local Swiss...I know I had when I came here...which was of course not very popular...

Second, the universities has no issues at all filling their IT-spots...

The problem is, the universities in Switzerland cannot alone meet the demand of the market...

IT is very attractive engineering compared to e.g. mechanical or electrical...CS IT engineer for instance has 1.5 to 2 times higher salary than for instance an ABB one...

Sorry, but your argument does not hold...

When the companies want qualified IT labor they do not have people doing apprenticeship in mind...maybe if a company needs somebody doing some secretary work, assistance or similar...

"theory-overloaded university folks, who find it difficult to turn their knowledge into practice"...really? ...

to start at the bottom, YES, this is what experienced academics tell you, that CH universities are too far away from reality

to get up to the upper half. Apprentices are people with a combination of theoretical and practical abilities, and while rather a nuisance in the first year in the other 2 or 3 years are highly profitable. And NO, the Gewerbeschule does not take care of people doing some "secretary work", not even does the KV Zürich. When a company wants "qualified IT labour" but is not willing to have apprentices it itself as a company is not qualified (what they have in mind does not matter) and should go where it belongs to, down the drain ... and some such companies have gone exactly done that, faded away. A good company is managed intelligently enough and does employ apprentices and so will have its internal "reservoir" of staff in a medium term. Companies have to plan for a decade and not just for 10 months

A) the universities in Switzerland could do more if they modernised their ideas
B) the universities in Switzerland however cannot provide people who were never born
C) the univeristies in Switzerland for decades now have accepted students from outside Switzerland and have accepted lecturers from outside Switzerland

I agree that the universities are can be a little bit abstract, BUT they have to be very careful to not turn into faculty that is driven from the market in the way of education. They have to be total independent but have good collaboration/connection with the market, like with the different business research centers. My experience with new graduates usually from ETH is very good & they hold a very high standard.

A company that is looking for an engineer, for them it is impossible to hire somebody who is doing an apprenticeship for that kind of work, not only from know-how, but from the way of working and solving issues. At our place we can put a new examined ETH student doing quite complicated things in the beginning although with somebody coaching them, an apprentice however are normally laboratory assistance and doing lighter documentations, but they are far away from doing self-going and they have not learned how go analyze and solve problems on a certain level which is required.

A) you want them to change the fundamental science? how do you modernize math and physics?

B) I never heard that the universities had issues filling the places, but they have to start lobbying for the young women in Switzerland (see Sweden)

C) I guess that they want the most talented students (?)...

Yeah, but that is exactly one of the deeper problems. Nobody is willing to invest, they only want to profit.... So round and round it goes..

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I do not want to do anything thelike, BUT my cousin told me that things should get changed. And it was NOT "changing fundamental science" but adopt ideas from US-American, British and French universities. The idea is not to modernize math and physics but how the stuff is taught

-- No, quite to the contrary, the colleges send out the lower 40% of each class in order to reduce the number of students
-- young women have entered the Swiss universities long ago and according to the media now are a majority in both Uni and ETH. I don't know on what statistics these reports were based, but whatever, the number of female students is considerable

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What they want is a number of students who find seats