In Switzerland, as in many European countries, refugees aged 16 to 35 face significant employment challenges, often lacking the necessary educational and vocational credentials for qualified work (Aerne & Bonoli, 2021; Spadarotto et al., 2014). The Swiss government has launched the Integration Agenda Switzerland IAS to enhance refugees' job prospects, proposing post-compulsory (vocational) education for this age group. One of its key initiatives is the one-year pre-vocational programme (pre-apprenticeship for integration, PAI), which was launched in 2018 (Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft et al., 2018; Stalder et al., 2024) and has been running successfully since then. The PAI combines in-company training with school-based education and is offered in various occupational fields like the building trade, hospitality, sales, and care. Using resource theory (Hobfoll et al., 2018), the job characteristic theory (Hackman & Oldham, 1980), and their application to the field of dual VET (Stalder & Lüthi, 2020), previous research has explored the PAI programme's role in fostering career success among participating refugees (Stalder et al., 2024). It was found that both situational resources (i.e., high-quality learning environment in the workplace and vocational school) and refugees' individual resources contribute to their successful transition to a regular VET programme. Essential situational resources include high learning opportunities and close guidance from supervisors, teachers, and coaches. Crucial individual resources are, amongst others, refugees' language skills, effort, and career aspirations. Expanding our knowledge about the effectiveness of the PAI programme, this contribution focuses on the less successful refugees: Those who have not succeeded in enrolling in the PAI and those who left the programme before its end. The latter concerns about one out of six persons. Using monitoring data on 4000 PAI participants from 2018 to 2023, we first examine the individuals' resources of refugees who did not follow the programme, exploring their alternative pathways and their opportunities to enter a regular VET programme directly. We second compare their resources and career success with refugees participating in the PAI programme. We assume that those who did not enrol in the PAI a) have more limited individual resources than those participants and, consequently, b) have lower chances of entering a regular VET programme. The findings will be discussed in the light of resource theory and highlight the risks and challenges of educational measures such as the PAI.

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