Further and continuing education

With the journeyman's certificate in hand you are a skilled service assistant — but you do not need to stop there. One of the strengths of the vocational educations is that they are built so you can build further both professionally and upwards towards management. Here is the overview of your options if you want to go further at some point.

The easiest way to stay sharp and specialize is through short further training courses. Labour market training (AMU) offers shorter courses in, for example, hygiene, cleaning techniques, quality management and special tasks. They work well to take alongside work and give you concrete, applicable skills — and documentation of them.

• 01AMU courses in hygiene, cleaning techniques, and quality
• 02Specialty courses aimed at e.g., the health sector
• 03Certificate and update courses in safety

If you want to go further, you can build on your professional certificate with an academy education typically taken part-time alongside work. Within the service and cleaning field there is higher education that dives deeper into hygiene, cleaning technology, management and operations. It is a path that can move you from executing the work to planning and managing it.

Many service assistants move over time towards roles with more responsibility: team leader cleaning manager service manager or operations manager. Here you use your professional insight to plan work instruct colleagues ensure quality and have contact with customers and partners. A combination of experience and further education is the typical path there.

A journeyman's certificate also opens the door to changing direction. You can choose to specialise deeply in, for example, hospital hygiene, or you can use your vocational qualification as access to entirely different education. Vocational qualifications can be combined with subjects that provide study competence if you later want to pursue a completely different field.

You don't need to know everything in advance. Get a few years in the trade, find out what attracts you — the practical craft, the hygiene, the management — and build from there where your interest is. A study counsellor or your trade union can help you find the specific courses and qualifications that fit your plan.

“A journeyman's certificate is a door, not a wall. You decide how far you want to go through it.”

— Career subject point