The paper discusses in an international comparative perspective the development of VET in two countries with similar apprenticeship traditions. Both have, for a long time, received major international attention on account of their structural specifity, their traditional principles, and, above all, because they seem to solve the problem of integrating young people into the labour market relatively smoothly (see e.g. Prais, 1981). These systems, as Raggatt observes for Germany in particular, are characterised by comprehensive and detailed regulatory systems for apprenticeship training, quite in contrast, e.g., with England and its rather "fractured system" (Raggatt, 1988, p. 175; Keep, 2015). Since subsidiarity and consensus building restrict the scope of state regulation, both VET approaches may be called "collective skill formation systems" (Busemeyer/Trampusch, 2019).

The importance and standing of VET in both countries even today is based on this kind of institutional peculiarity (Deissinger, 2010). In the aftermath of the Second World War, they showed a remarkable stability, as well as conceptual conservatism, which finally became challenged by scholars and politicians. Both in Germany and Switzerland, the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, urged politicians to educational reforms and the overcoming of established patterns, such as the three-tier secondary school system. The expansion of higher secondary education led to rising pressure to reform and modernise the dual apprenticeship system with its strong employer involvement (Busemeyer, 2009, pp. 79ff.; Greinert, 1994), although it did neither result in undermining the vocational principle in the VET system, nor subsidiarity and consensus building - parameters mostly recurring to the late 19th century (Deissinger/Gonon, 2021).

The obvious stability of the apprenticeship system seems to be one of the reasons why links between higher and vocational education, including 'hybridity', i.e. the formal combination of a vocational and a general qualification, are rather weak in Germany (Deissinger et al., 2013). In Switzerland, however, the establishment of the professional baccalaureate in the early 1990s led to a hybrid system (Gonon, 2013), which does not keep the VET sector apart from higher education but offers apprentices access to the universities of applied science.

The paper tries to give an answer to the question how and under which conditions the pathways of stability became divergent in the two countries with respect to 'hybridity' at the end of the 20th century.

This international comparative study refers to two countries which are most similar in terms of the structural features of their dual systems and the standing of VET in society. However, they partly developed – especially since the 1990s – differently, which is the focus of our comparative analysis. Our paper is literature-based and reconstructs the continuity which characterises both VET systems and their development in the second half of the 20th century. A particular attention is given to the divergent ways towards hybridity, which normally may not be assumed against the background of a very similar understanding of initial VET in the apprenticeship system in the two countries. As an underlying criterion for comparison (tertium comparationis) we discuss the issue of structural and functional links between VET in a narrow sense (delivery of labour-market relevant qualifications) and the higher education system. Our method is based on the paradigm of historical research looking at the "relevance for the present time" (Gegenwartsbedeutsamkeit) - which means to identify and substantiate, beyond the mere focus on historical facts and national pathways, their significance for an understanding of present-day problems (Zabeck, 2013; Gonon, 2020) - both in a national and a comparative perspective.

The paper tries to give an answer to the question how and under which conditions the pathways of stability became divergent in the two countries with respect to 'hybridity' at the end of the 20th century.

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