Switzerland in my case. It's quite similar, but with some extended vocational university options compared to Germany ('Fachhochschule'). Anyways, the way it generally works for most professions (and ~75-80% of population actually go through this route, rather than going straight to academia) is as follows:

* start apprenticeship at 16 for 3-4 years; 3-4 days per week of being embedded in a company as apprentice, 1-2 days of staying in school

* at the end of apprenticeship you do a test, both theoretical and practical. your 'apprentice master' (Lehrmeister) is judging your practical skills in form of an apprentice project. Passing that you're the equivalent of journeyman.

* you can now either start working full time, or you go back to school for 1y to get the federal professional maturity test ('Berufsmatura'). This allows you to enter any higher vocational school in your field in the country.

* from here you go on to either do a vocational university, or you could even take another test and go full on academia (say to ETH Zurich, University, whatever). That gives you the equivalent of BSc or MSc, depending on where you go and how long you stay.

* On top of the bologna titles, there is also the 'federally certified' titles. Say you wanna be a certified construction manager, you go do a federal certificate and become one of ~2500 people in the country with that title. It's highly sought after and a sign of quality. Think of it like professional master titles given by the French state, if you reach that you should never have to worry finding a job. You'll generally be >30y old at that point.

Now I'm curious so I'll pick your brain a bit. What happens if you want to change careers later in life? Do you go back to apprenticeships with other 16-year olds, or is there a different path for adult education?

And when you start a BSc at the earliest, you are something like 20 years old? (16 when you apprentice, 19 when you finish that, one more year plus two tests to enter university?)

I‘ve never seen adult apprentices, don’t think it exists. Rather you‘d do internships and evening schools, as everywhere else. The difference mainly comes from apprenticeships being the norm for teenagers, it creates IMO an environment of comparatively high skill levels in all kinds of trades. Maybe not too surprising that Germany and Switzerland are generally good at machines and fine mechanics.

20ish sounds about right - in Switzerland, men loose a year due to military/civil service.

We had someone doing an internship in our SWE company (Switzerland) whom I estimated about 60 years. But never heard of someone doing an apprenticeship beyond late twenties or so (may exist, though).

To be honest, I find the idea of classifying people from journeyman to master rather unsuitable for today's knowledge work. It does not pass the smell-test for gate-keeping.

What you need to know changes every five years. Call someone grand-master of software engineering, sure, but no matter how great they are they'll not get your CRUD database UI done any faster - if their career was all about signal processing for particle accelerators and medical device certification. More likely, they'll over-engineer and over-spec and not be prepared for requirements to change completely after a year, or for sinking several days into CSS layout issues. Beyond a certain baseline of experience (say, working five years in the field or so), what counts is knowing the domain well (interpreting what the customer wants). Or already having experience with the technology that applies to problem-of-the-day. Or being highly motivated to learn it.

It's not like crafting with wood. The nature of wood doesn't change every six months. The tools we use to work wood don't change every six months.