Aptitude tests for a Swiss apprenticeship: Multicheck, Basic Check and Stellwerk compared

Anyone applying for an apprenticeship in Switzerland runs into an aptitude test sooner or later. The training company asks for a Multicheck certificate, the school runs the Stellwerk, and from May 2026 the Basic Check joins them for part of the trades. The three procedures do not belong together. They have different clients, they cost between ten and a hundred francs, and they answer different questions. This article sorts out which test exists for what, who pays for it, and what it actually says about an applicant.

If you have moved to Switzerland recently, read the next two sections first. Without them the rest of this page describes a system that looks like something it is not.

What a Lehre is, and why it is not a fallback

At around 15 or 16, at the end of Sekundarstufe I, which is lower secondary school, young people in Switzerland take one of two main routes. One is the Gymnasium, the academic upper secondary school that leads to the Matura and from there directly to university, with no separate university entrance exam. The other is the Lehre, the apprenticeship. Around two thirds of a school-leaving year group take the vocational route rather than the Gymnasium, according to the Swiss Education Report 2026.

An apprenticeship here is not what the English word usually describes. A three- or four-year apprenticeship ends with the Eidgenössisches Fähigkeitszeugnis, the EFZ, a federally recognised qualification. A two-year one ends with the Eidgenössisches Berufsattest, the EBA. In both cases the young person is employed by a company, the Lehrbetrieb, is paid a wage from the first month, and spends one or two days a week at a vocational school. Professions that in some countries are entered only through a university degree are learnt this way here: electrician, laboratory technician, IT specialist, commercial clerk in a bank.

The route is not a dead end either, which is the second thing that surprises people. Alongside or after the apprenticeship comes the Berufsmaturität, a vocational baccalaureate that opens the Fachhochschulen, the universities of applied sciences. From there, a supplementary exam called the Passerelle opens the regular universities. A fifteen-year-old who starts an apprenticeship has not closed the door to a degree, only chosen a longer corridor towards it.

For parents this matters practically. Advising a child away from an apprenticeship because it sounds like the lesser option is advice built on a different country’s system.

Applying for an apprenticeship works like applying for a job

The second thing to understand is that nobody is allocated an apprenticeship. The young person applies to companies, in writing, usually a year or more before the start, with a covering letter, a CV and the last two school reports. Companies invite candidates to a Schnupperlehre, a taster placement of a few days in which the applicant works in the business and is watched at it. Then they choose.

Many companies ask for one more document alongside the school report: an aptitude test certificate. That is what the Multicheck and the Basic Check are. They are commercial products, bought by the applicant from a private company, sat at a test centre under supervision. They are not school exams, no education authority sets them, and no school marks them. That distinction is worth holding on to, because it explains the price, the booking system and the fact that you can sit the same test twice.

One more point that applies to everything on this page: education in Switzerland is a cantonal matter. There are 26 cantons and no national school system. Whether your child’s school runs the Stellwerk, which class it falls in, and what the school recommends about aptitude tests depends on where you live. The tests themselves are national products, the school context around them is not.

The four procedures at a glance

The price gap between the Stellwerk and the Multicheck surprises people regularly: same school year, same age group, ten francs against a hundred. It follows from who is buying. The school buys the Stellwerk by the class set, whereas an individual books the Multicheck as an appointment in a test centre with invigilation, an identity check and a certificate in one person’s name.

Multicheck and Basic Check both come from gateway solutions ag, which trades as gateway.one. Almost no advice page in the Swiss index writes that down, and it explains several things at once further below.

What changes in May 2026

The provider puts it in so many words: the Multicheck Gewerbe, the version for the skilled trades, is being discontinued for the 2026/2027 test period and replaced by the Basic Check. The Basic Check therefore starts in May 2026. One distinction slips in advice articles again and again: only the Gewerbe version is being replaced. The technical Multicheck, which the provider itself calls Multicheck TEK, is being developed further and stays. Anyone heading for a technical profession changes nothing in their planning. Anyone who was aiming at the Gewerbe test will find the detail in the article on the switch to the Basic Check.

The Multicheck: eight versions, one appointment at a test centre

With around 30‘000 sittings a year, the Multicheck is the best known of the procedures. It consists of eight versions, each covering one occupational field: Attest (for the two-year EBA apprenticeship), Detailhandel und Service (retail and service), Gesundheit und Soziales (health and social care), ICT, Media und Design, Pharma und Chemie (pharmaceuticals and chemistry), TEK (the technical trades) and Wirtschaft und Administration (business and administration). The German names are the ones on the booking page, which is why they are given here in the original.

The version determines price and duration. Attest costs CHF 60 and takes about 1.5 hours, Detailhandel und Service costs CHF 85, and the remaining six cost CHF 100 each and run up to 3.5 hours. Which version belongs to which profession is set out in the overview of all eight versions with prices.

The Basic Check: one core module and optional add-ons

The Basic Check costs CHF 100 and takes 2.5 to 3.5 hours depending on the modules chosen. It is built to be occupation-neutral. The core module covers German, mathematics and cognitive skills, and optional modules can be added: English, French, practical technical understanding, practical problem solving and digital everyday skills. The content is pitched at the curriculum as it stands at the end of the 8. Klasse, which in the HarmoS count is the end of the tenth school year. The test period runs, as with the Multicheck, from the end of May to the end of May the following year, with one repeat per cycle.

The 8. Klasse is worth a sentence of its own, because every content statement about these tests refers to it. It is the second-to-last year of compulsory lower secondary school, and pupils in it are roughly 14. That is the level the questions are written for. Sitting the test earlier means meeting material that has not been taught yet, which shows up in the result without saying anything about the person.

The Stellwerk: ten francs, and a scale that is often misread

The Stellwerk comes from Lehrmittelverlag St. Gallen, the cantonal teaching materials publisher, and the item pool is built together with the St. Gallen University of Teacher Education. There is a Stellwerk 7, 8 and 9, based on the Lehrplan 21, the common curriculum of the German-speaking cantons. It tests mathematics, German, French and English, and since the 2023/24 school year also science and technology.

The scale runs from 200 to 800, and this is where the most common misunderstanding starts. The Stellwerk is multidimensional and adaptive: it adjusts the difficulty of the next question to the answers already given. The score therefore describes the difficulty of the questions mastered, not the number of correct answers. Two pupils with the same number of hits can end up with different scores because they solved questions of different difficulty. A score of 600 does not mean “75 per cent correct”.

Which cantons use the Stellwerk

The official cantonal list on stellwerk.ch names ten cantons: Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Bern, Lucerne, Nidwalden, Obwalden, St. Gallen, Schaffhausen, Schwyz, Zug and Zurich. Whether it is compulsory is a separate question, decided canton by canton, and the position moves.

Where we could not verify a canton’s rule at the cantonal authority, no rule is stated here. In case of doubt the cantonal education office or the head teacher decides, and what they say beats any advice page including this one.

What an aptitude test actually measures

Behind the subject names sits a smaller number of abilities than the question papers suggest. A mathematics section under time pressure measures not only whether someone can calculate percentages, but also how quickly the task is grasped, how many intermediate steps are held in the head at once, and how reliably that holds up across twenty questions. Those three things, speed of comprehension, working memory and reasoning, turn up in every part of the test, in the German section as much as in the logic section.

That is why the results of individual sections hang together more closely than their labels suggest. Someone who does well in the logic section is more often than not also good in the mathematics section, even though one section contains no school material and the other almost nothing else.

Why the logic section resembles a matrix test

The logic and concentration items in an aptitude test follow the same construction principles as the items in a classic matrix test. A pattern is shown, a rule sits inside it, the rule has to be carried over to a new case, and the clock is running. Whether the rule sits in shapes, in number sequences or in word pairs changes the demand less than it looks. That is precisely why the Multicheck is, to a substantial degree, a test of the same ability a matrix test measures, only dressed in school material and in an occupational field. How these items are built and how to read them is set out in our explanation of matrix reasoning.

How accurate is a single test day?

Every measurement has a spread, and a two- to three-hour test does not measure to the point. Sleep, nerves, a missed train, a cold: things like that shift a result without anything having changed about the person. Serious procedures therefore report not a single value but a range within which the true value lies with high probability. In practice that means a difference of a few points between two applicants carries no verdict. A clear gap across several sections says more than an outlier in one. How to read a single Multicheck result is covered in understanding your Multicheck result.

What no aptitude test measures

The Swiss Education Report 2026 records that 24 per cent of EFZ apprenticeship contracts are terminated early. The reasons rarely lie where an aptitude test is looking. Punctuality, care, dealing with customers, tolerance of frustration on the third difficult day, manual skill, the fit between a person and a particular workplace: none of that appears on the certificate. An aptitude test answers the question of whether the school-level and cognitive groundwork for a profession is there. It does not answer the question of whether that profession is the right one. For the second question a Schnupperlehre and the careers guidance service are far better instruments.

Every canton runs a Berufsberatung, a public careers guidance service, and it is open to families who have just arrived as much as to anyone else.

Who pays for the test?

With the Multicheck and the Basic Check the applicant pays in principle. Many training companies do, however, hand out vouchers that cover the whole amount, and individual municipalities and cantons offer financial support. The order is therefore: first ask the company you want to apply to for a voucher code, then ask the regional careers guidance service, and only then book it yourself. The Stellwerk runs through the school and normally costs the family nothing. The Berufs-Check from Yousty is free and can be taken anywhere, but it does not replace a test centre certificate where a company expressly asks for one.

The test period sets your timetable

Multicheck and Basic Check run in test periods that reach from the end of May to the end of May the following year. That period is the frame for everything else: for the number of attempts possible, for the note that appears on a repeat, and for the question of whether a certificate from last year still reflects the current form of the test.

In practice that means three things. First, most sittings fall in May and June, and in those months the certificate takes longer to produce. Second, the test appointment belongs two to three weeks before the application deadline, not in the week before it. Third, it is worth looking at the calendar before planning a second attempt: if both attempts fall in the same period, a note appears on the certificate.

Which procedure in which situation

What to do in the four weeks before the appointment

In week one, work right through the provider’s free preparation tool once, so that no instruction is new on the day. In week two, take on the mathematics material of the 8. Klasse, specifically fractions and percentages, the rule of three, areas and volumes, and work twenty minutes a day against a stopwatch rather than at leisure. In week three, read one longer factual text a day and summarise it in three sentences, which trains the reading comprehension section. Week four belongs to logistics: sort out the journey, put the identity document ready, sleep normally the two nights before. What works beyond that and what does not is covered in preparing for the Multicheck.

If you want to get to know the item format behind the logic sections, you can work through our free test. It does not replace an aptitude certificate and does not try to, but it shows in 25 minutes what this kind of question feels like.