Consider the societies that have best absorbed the shocks of the past two decades: the financial crisis, the pandemic, the slow fracturing of global supply chains. Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Singapore. None of them abandoned the business of making things. What they did instead was more subtle and more difficult. They made skilled technical work respectable, even prestigious, and they built durable institutions to sustain it. Roughly two-thirds of young Swiss enter vocational training rather than a conventional university, and Switzerland remains one of the wealthiest and most innovative nations on earth. That is not an accident. It is a strategy.
The Western Balkans have arrived at the moment when this lesson matters most. As European companies pull production closer to home – wary of long and brittle supply lines to Asia – Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina are being drawn into the continent's industrial map. The investment is arriving. The machines are arriving. What is missing, almost everywhere, is the workforce trained to run them.
Which brings me to a profession most people in the region have never heard of: the polymechanic. It is a Swiss invention, and a revealing one. A polymechanic is not a narrow tradesman but a hybrid – part machinist, part programmer, part engineer. He or she reads a technical drawing, machines a part to a tolerance of hundredths of a millimeter, writes the code that instructs the machine and repairs it when it fails. In a single worker, the manual and the digital are fused. This is precisely the kind of competence that advanced manufacturing now demands, and precisely the kind that university degrees and short courses alike tend to miss.
The deeper point is institutional. What makes the polymechanic possible is not a curriculum but a system – the Swiss model of dual vocational training, in which young people learn simultaneously inside a company and a classroom, with employers helping to shape what is taught. It is this marriage of education and industry, more than any natural resource, that explains the enduring success of the German-speaking economies.
Here in Eastern Europe, the region has an advantage it rarely recognizes. Organizations like Swisscontact have spent decades doing the work of adapting the Swiss model to local conditions rather than transplanting it whole. In 2025, Swisscontact programmes in Eastern Europe supported 5,774 people complete training in skills development, entrepreneurship and labour market insertion, and 32 percent of them came from particularly marginalised groups.
The task now is not to import Switzerland but to build, in Skopje and Tirana and Kyiv, qualifications that employers trust and that young people can pursue without emigrating.
The stakes are larger than any single job. The region loses its most talented young people every year to the labour markets of the West. A generation trained in skills the local economy actually values would give them a reason to stay and give investors a reason to come.
The window will not stay open indefinitely. Supply chains are being redrawn now; the countries that supply the talent will capture the factories.
For funders weighing where their support does the most good, the case is clear: invest in the skills that anchor industry and keep young people at home. That is the decision this World Youth Skills Day should prompt.