The classroom is full. The Marcel-Dassault de Mérignac vocational high school trains 30 students each year in the watchmaking professions. For two years, 24 students joined the fundamentals of this CAP profession, and six of them deepen this know-how by the BMA, the Brevet des Crafts d’Art.
In Mérignac, the training attracts candidates from all over France, mainly from New Aquitaine. Whole promotions that learn this technique, this thoroughness. It is not uncommon for that she seduces candidates who seek to change paths, like Maxime, 25, who returned to his passion after a trade in trade. “The best choice of my life,” he says. Proof that the establishment “adapts to profiles which have very specific routes”, underlines the principal Eric Rottier.
Registered with UNESCO
The Lycée de Mérignac is one of the rare training centers of national education that exists in France, and one of the ways to become a watchmaker, with the professional title of the Ministry of Labor and the certificates of the Watchmaking Federation . Rare but prized: France is renowned for the quality of training. “We have very good schools in France which are well rated internationally. Each year, we get out of the watchmakers working in big houses. There is capacity, ”notes the general delegate of the watchmaking federation Laurent Baup.
-After crossing crises, the sector seems to find a new breath. The future watchmakers will find their place in the main employment areas that are located in Paris and in the east of France, more precisely in Franche-Comté, its historic cradle. But the vast majority do not hesitate to cross the border, in search of better remuneration: more than 5,000 people work in the watchmaking sector in France and nearly 18,000 French people work in Switzerland.
This Franco-Swiss axis cultivates a know-how now inscribed by UNESCO as the intangible heritage of humanity. Each year, the large manufacture Jaegler-LeCoultre, in Switzerland, forms for a month six students from the Marcel-Dassault high school.
