Almost everything written about Ausbildung — including our own guide to what Ausbildung is — describes the company-based dual system by default, because it’s the more common route and the one most Indian applicants are placed into. But a meaningful number of German vocational qualifications, several of them in healthcare and therapy professions, are organised the other way round: led by a school rather than a company. The German terms for these are betriebliche Ausbildung (company-based) and schulische Ausbildung (school-based), and the practical differences between them are large enough that conflating the two causes real confusion about pay and visa financing.
Betriebliche Ausbildung — the company-led route
This is the dual system most people mean when they say “Ausbildung.” A company is your primary training provider and your employer: you sign a training contract with them, they pay you a monthly training allowance that rises each year, and they release you to attend a vocational school for the theoretical portion of your training. Germany’s federal training institute, BIBB, describes companies as holding “a key position” in this arrangement — they are formally responsible for a defined share of what you’re examined on, not just providing work experience.
Because you are legally an employee from day one, betriebliche Ausbildung is paid according to the same rules that apply to all German apprenticeships: a statutory minimum of €724 a month in 2026, or more if your employer is bound by a collective agreement, where BIBB’s most recent survey put the first-year average at €1,117 a month. This is the route Auzubi Global places into.
Schulische Ausbildung — the school-led route
A number of occupations, several care and therapy professions among them, are structured differently: a vocational school (often a Berufsfachschule) is the lead training provider rather than a company. You may still complete work placements as part of the course, but you are formally a student of the school rather than an employee of a company, and pay — where any exists — is typically lower than a company-based apprenticeship, or absent entirely, since the school is not employing you in the same legal sense a training company would.
This is exactly why the German Federal Foreign Office’s own visa checklist treats company-based and school-based training differently for financing purposes: where your income from the training falls below a government-set threshold, the shortfall has to be closed with a blocked account or a formal sponsor commitment (a Verpflichtungserklärung) before a visa is issued. That threshold, and the exact euro figures involved, change periodically — we keep the current numbers on our programmes page rather than quoting a figure here that may already be out of date by the time you read this.
What this means practically
| Betriebliche (company-based) | Schulische (school-based) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who you report to | An employer, under a training contract | A vocational school, as a student |
| Pay | Statutory minimum or higher, rising yearly | Often lower, sometimes none |
| Visa financing | Often self-sufficient once employed | More often needs a blocked account |
| Typical fields | Trades, IT, hospitality, logistics, banking | Several therapy and care-adjacent professions |
Which route we place into
Auzubi Global places candidates into company-based, dual Ausbildung specifically — including our nursing and healthcare route, which in most cases is structured as betriebliche Ausbildung with a training contract and salary from day one, not the unpaid school-based route some general nursing training abroad involves. If you’ve read about a school-based nursing or therapy programme elsewhere and aren’t sure which category it falls into, ask us directly rather than assuming — the financing implications are different enough to matter.
Check which route fits before you commit
Talk to us about your specific profile and target sector. We’ll tell you which structure applies and what it means for your visa financing before you commit to anything.
Where this comes from: the structure and legal role of companies in vocational training is from the Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BIBB). The distinction in visa financing requirements between company-based and school-based training is from the German Missions in India vocational training visa checklist, published by the Federal Foreign Office. Pay figures are from BIBB’s apprenticeship pay report and its notice on the 2026 statutory minimum allowance.
