The skilled workforce and the apprenticeship system

The coffee trade: a cluster that came and went

The history of the coffee trade shows how quickly a cluster can form and dissolve. Between about 1995 and 2015, Zug became, according to one account, the location from which about half of the world's coffee trade was handled. After 2015, the canton lost this position to Zurich, as a result of mergers and relocations among the trading houses.¹ The episode shows that the concentration of an industry in Zug is not guaranteed by the canton's tax policy alone. Trading houses move when their owners change, when their management relocates or when a neighbouring city offers a better combination of talent and infrastructure. The competition that brought companies to Zug from Zurich can also take them back.

The skilled workforce and the apprenticeship system

The industrial enterprises of Zug did more than produce goods. They trained people. The Swiss system of vocational education, in which young people combine an apprenticeship in a company with attendance at a vocational school, has been the backbone of the country's industrial workforce for more than a century, with the large enterprises of Zug among its most active participants. Landis & Gyr trained generations of mechanics, electricians and technicians, while the Metallwarenfabrik and the paper mills trained their own skilled workers. Roche, in Rotkreuz, today trains 131 apprentices.² In 2022, 1,147 new apprenticeship contracts were registered in the canton.³

The significance of this system for the headquarters economy is easily overlooked. The decision of Roche in the early 1970s to expand in Zug and to keep its operation there, described above, was driven by the availability of skilled mechanics, electricians and machinists, a workforce that the industrial tradition of the canton had produced. The engineering tradition of Landis & Gyr supplied the building technology business of Siemens with its specialists. The combination of an industrial workforce trained in the Swiss apprenticeship system with the international managers and specialists attracted by the headquarters economy gives the canton a labour market that few locations of its size can match.

The apprenticeship system also explains a feature of the Swiss economy that surprises foreign observers: the relatively low share of university graduates in the workforce, combined with high productivity and low unemployment. In Zug, unemployment stood at 1.7 per cent in 2022.⁴ For the international groups that establish themselves in the canton, the system offers a way to recruit and train local staff for technical and commercial functions. Many of these groups have become active training companies. The practitioner who advises a foreign group on the establishment of a headquarters in Zug should draw its attention to this possibility, which serves both the group's need for staff and its standing in the local community.

Notes

1. Zug in der Welt, "Der wichtigste Wirtschaftscluster im Kanton Zug": between 1995 and 2015 Zug briefly dominated global coffee trading, handling approximately half of worldwide coffee trade, before losing its market position to Zurich after 2015 owing to corporate consolidations and relocations. ↩
2. Roche, "Roche feiert 50 Jahre Diagnostik-Standort Rotkreuz": 131 apprentices trained at the Rotkreuz site. ↩
3. Zuger Kantonalbank, "Der Kanton Zug in Zahlen", edition 2023: 1,147 apprenticeship registrations in 2022. ↩
4. Zuger Kantonalbank, "Der Kanton Zug in Zahlen", edition 2023: unemployment rate of 1.7 per cent in 2022; employment rate of 66.6 per cent in 2021. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.