Unlock the digestive of free editor
Roula Khalaf, the FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Switzerland’s schedule sales may be in a declining spiral, but there seems to be still a healthy enthusiasm among teens to start careers in the hours and micro-mechanics.
“These days, even with the slowdown of the industry, we still get much more applications than we can accommodate,” says Stéphane Cruchaud, head of the école d’Orogerie de geneve, the oldest school of Switzerland, which recently celebrated its 200th anniversary.
“Yeardo year we have the availability of 36 students to study hours and 12 to study micro-mechanics, but those 48 countries usually attract about 200 applicants,” he says. “There is a little less interest when the general economy sinks, but the courses are always popular.”
Such is the importance of making hours for the Swiss economy that courses are part of the CFC (Federal Capacity Certificate) that prepares young people to work in specific industry, with students who begin their EHG studies at the age of 15 after leaving basic education.
Courses can end up in schools such as EHG (individual cantons often have their own) or based on practice with an approved hour company. EHG is publicly funded by the Geneva Canton, which means that students are required to pay only SFR80 ($ 90) to cover the cost of more basic materials, such as letters and other writing.
“Only people whose parents pay taxes in the canton can study here, and the state drives us to get only people who have just finished their legal education,” Cruchaud says. “This means that most students are aged 15 to 18 because the courses are either three or four years long.
“I would prefer to have a mix of first -year students between the ages of 15 and 16, and 18 and 19, because, as a schedule, you have to be calm, you have to be able to focus for long periods and you have to be focused. This is not always easy for someone who is still in their early teens.”
Courses, three years for making basic hours and four years for a more advanced qualification or to train as a “micro-mechanical”-which enables graduates to understand and operate complex computer-controlled machinery used in hormology and other intense health manufacturing.
During the first year, students do not go to an observation movement, but learn how to make tools-such as screwdrivers and levers that give up. They begin to work on viewing movements in the second year, while the third year is spent refreshing all the skills they need from the first phase, learning how to work in more complex movements and further reducing the productive tolerances of finished ingredients.
At the beginning of the third year, students also begin to make a “school hour”, a relatively basic pocket clock or, if they are undertaking a fourth year – which provides them for restoration, production and passage work – a more complex hand hour.
Some of the components for each type of class can be created at school, but since 2004 the independent Watch Chopard brand has supplied groups of other life parts without which students would not be able to create the school classes they remove with them by finishing their courses.
“For more than 20 years, we have submitted 750 sets between 70 and 80 ingredients that allow each student to work on his / her movement,” says co-president Chopard Karl-Frichrich Scheuphle.
“The school used to use an old pocket pocket movement, which we brought to a much more modern standard using parts produced by our products in Fleurier and Geneva. We have done enough to keep school for another 20 years.”
Now Chopard is marking the 200th anniversary of EHG with a series of 20 hours in its heritage range with movements based on the type of caliber that supplies the school.
Due to this week’s discovery in Watches & Wonders, Luc Heritage EHG Moon 122 contains a precise moonphase screen that, if the clock is running, will not have to be corrected for 122 years. Dial adventure describes an interpretation of the night sky and the movement behind it is decorated at an ultra high level.
44 mm gold watches, with roses will be offered to set collectors, while a small number of Moon’s basic movements will be made available to EHG students to finish, as well as for the graduated chopard practitioners themselves.
The idea of making these special hours was raised in 2023 when the school was preparing to be transferred from its 40-year-old site to Lancy to the new, best art-to-oates, where some of the Chopard’s operations are sitting along with those of other Chep-Chip Geneva names, such as Patek Philippe and Rolex.
The mass, partly funded by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, the owner of the majority of Rolex, is set to enable the school to function for the next decades – something Scheuphle believes is vital to the industry. “Schools like this are so important because we are all at the mercy of maintaining good class traditions,” he says. “All of us in the industry must be supportive to keep these crafts alive.”
EHG -led trips will be among the activities available during the hours and miracles, on 2, 3 and 4 April
