There is a number in Swiss vocational training that nobody is proud of.
In the canton of Schaffhausen, the dropout rate among apprentices in gastronomy professions – cooks, restaurant staff, kitchen assistants – hovered between 30 and 70 percent in recent years. Not a bad quarter. Not an outlier. A sustained, structural problem that was quietly draining the industry of the people it needed most.
Lukas Pem knew this number well. As an inter-company course instructor, culinary expert, and didactics coach at Get More Brain, he had spent years at the intersection of kitchen practice and vocational pedagogy. He had also seen what was causing the dropouts: not a lack of motivation on the part of apprentices, but a lack of support for the people training them.
Vocational trainers – the cooks, floor managers, and restaurateurs who take on apprentices in their businesses – were largely left to figure things out on their own. There was a mandatory trainer course and an annual meeting. Beyond that: good luck.
The Vision
In early 2025, Lukas co-developed a project proposal for the Hotel Gastro Formation Schaffhausen (HGf-SH), the cantonal body responsible for coordinating hospitality vocational training. The idea was called «Gemeinsam statt einsam» – «Together instead of alone».
The goal was specific: reduce apprenticeship dropout rates by two thirds, from peaks above 40 percent to a stable maximum of 15 percent by the 2028/29 school year.
The approach focused on a part of the system that most support programs overlook entirely: the vocational trainers. If you strengthen the people doing the training – give them tools, best practices, a place to ask questions, a community to lean on – the outcomes for apprentices follow.
That spring, the project won the Prix Vision, Switzerland’s most recognised award for innovation in vocational training. The prize came with CHF 32’460 in funding and, more importantly, a mandate to build something that lasts.
The Partner
To build the digital backbone of the project, HGf-SH turned to Get More Brain.
The choice wasn’t incidental. Lukas had been working with GMB’s platform for years – developing inter-company course materials, building learning paths, and testing what actually works when content needs to be used in a professional kitchen, not in a classroom.
The technical foundation was clear from the start: bitmark as the content standard, the GMB CMS for organisation and management, and the Get More Brain app as the mobile-first delivery surface. Not because it was the obvious choice, but because it was the right one.
Content in gastronomy training needs to work on a smartphone between prep and service. It needs to be available in 130+ languages for apprentices whose first language is not German. It needs to be structured so that trainers can actually navigate it without a manual. And it needs to live somewhere that all parties – the vocational school, the inter-company training centre, and the business – can access together.
That is exactly what the three-layer architecture of bitmark, GMB CMS, and the app provides.
What Was Built
The result is skillsdoc – a smart learning documentation system for apprentices in gastronomy professions, built on the Get More Brain platform.
It covers every apprenticeship profession in Swiss gastronomy: cooks and kitchen assistants, restaurant professionals, hotel-housekeeping staff, hotel communication specialists.
At its core, skillsdoc is a learning documentation tool. But that description undersells what it actually does.
Apprentices document their practical assignments directly on the job – on their phone, in the moment, as part of their daily work. Trainers review, approve, or comment. At the end of each semester, the training report is generated from the data that has already been collected throughout the term, rather than filled in from memory in a single stressful session.
The platform also includes the Best Practices Standards developed as part of the Prix Vision project: structured guidance for trainers on the ten most relevant process steps in vocational training, from selecting apprentices to preparing for the final examination. These are not generic templates. They are built from the accumulated experience of practitioners in the canton, organised into actionable learning paths.
A triage and coaching system sits alongside the content: vocational trainers who are struggling can reach out for support, access mediation, or connect with an experienced mentor. The infrastructure for that, too, runs through the platform.
The whole setup is designed to run for at least ten years – through to the next vocational reform cycle. The economics reflect that: CHF 99 per apprentice for the entire apprenticeship period, with no additional costs for trainers.
The Outcomes
The project is in active rollout, with the platform going live at the start of the 2025/26 school year. Early indicators are what you would expect when a fragmented system is finally connected: trainers are less isolated, information flows between learning locations, and the shared language between school, inter-company training, and workplace is no longer a goal on a slide deck.
The dropout rate figures for the coming years will tell the fuller story.
What is already clear: a problem that was tolerated for years because it seemed structurally intractable turned out to be solvable once someone stopped waiting for a top-down fix and built the infrastructure themselves.
