Bernard Arnault’s multibillion-dollar luxury conglomerate is facing a significant staffing deficit.
LVMH forecasts that it will have a record shortfall of 22,000 workers by the end of 2025, Bloomberg reports. Two-thirds of those positions must be filled by salespeople at the company’s boutiques (Louis Vuitton, Dior, and the like) and employees at its respective hotels across the globe. The remaining third are craftspeople and designers, who are required to put a special touch on things like a Loro Piana sweater or Hublot watch, for instance.
LVMH has a plan to fill the void, though: The French titan is training 700 apprentices globally this year to ensure its long history of craftsmanship continues. (For comparison’s sake, LVMH only had 180 apprentices in 2018.) More than a dozen of the apprentices will learn to work at Tiffany & Co. The storied American jeweler, which was acquired by LVMH in 2021, has joined forces with New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Studio Jewelers to ensure students have both theoretical and technical (hands-on) training.
Apprenticeships are still a common way to train workers in European countries like France, Germany, and Switzerland, but they are not as prevalent in America, according to academic Robert Lerman, who researched apprenticeships for three decades at the Urban Institute. Moreover, U.S. apprenticeships primarily focus on training construction workers, electricians, and plumbers. If LVMH’s rollout is successful, it will prove that apprenticeships in the luxury arena are viable stateside and beyond. As Lerman puts it, “It’s learning by doing. You can’t create jewelry just from a classroom.”
Interestingly, one-third (or roughly 33 percent) of LVMH’s new apprentices are “reskilling,” meaning they are learning new skills that are loosely related to their current jobs. For example, a product leader in marketing might train to become a Tiffany jeweler. Before the pandemic, that figure was around 10 percent. Alexandre Boquel, who runs LVMH’s apprenticeship program from Paris, attributes the increased desire to reskill to a collective need to break free of the digital world.
“A lot of people in France have been thinking that ‘I need to get back to something very tactile, to do something with my hands,’” adds Boquel. “It was surprising to see how many 40- to 45-year-olds were contacting us to find a profession as a jeweler.”
Evidently, it’s never too late to change careers.
