SVEB

In Switzerland, adult education possibilities are extensive and varied. These include courses, seminars, post-graduate studies as well as offers outside of course curricula, for instance: museum visits, workshops, lectures, field trips, conferences, and more. Also included are e-learning, in-company trainings, the independent use of learning materials and professional literature or learning in self-organized groups.

Providers range from small private schools to large enterprises financed privately or through public bodies, associations or labor unions. There are small learning facilities and free-lance instructors. Among the different providers the private sector clearly dominates the business: it provides about 80% of the total training hours available, while publicly supported courses provide only 20%, covered mainly by universities, universities for applied sciences and public vocational schools.

Diversity also characterizes the teaching contents. Among the most popular courses taken are always language courses with a share of 16% out of all booked courses within a year. Other important sectors - with a share of about 10% - are health / medicine courses, computer science courses and executive trainings. Most of these courses can be taken both for professional as well as private reasons. What is being learned for professional reasons can also be benefitted from privately, in voluntary work or for hobbies and vice versa: The work environment benefits from adults who gain a wide range of skills in their spare time.

Lifelong Learning
At the level of the course content it is therefore not possible to draw a clear line between work-oriented training and general education. Education experts have long accepted this challenge and have developed concepts that meet today's needs. Their approach is known as "Lifelong Learning": a paradigm that has gained more and more acceptance worldwide since the 1990s.

SVEB also takes the lifelong learning approach: For about 10 years, we have been using an integral training concept that is based on the paradigm of lifelong learning. The concept helps to overcome the increasingly unrealistic split into general and vocational education. One of the consequences in taking the lifelong learning perspective is that the terms "further education" and "adult education" mean much the same today.

The political structures are characterized by the federalist nature of Switzerland. This applies to all areas, but is particularly evident in the field of education. The responsibility here lies with the federal government, cantons and municipalities.  Centralized coordination in the field of adult education does not exist. Thus, the support structures tend to lack transparency. It is for example not known how many funds from the federal government and the cantons actually flow into the sector of further education.