Abstract
A series of seminal papers argues that poaching hampers company-sponsoredgeneral training. Empirically, however, the existence and extent of poachingremain open questions. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identifypoaching. We find that only few apprenticeship training firms in Germanyare ‘poaching victims’ or ‘poaching raiders’. Victims are more likely to bein a temporary downturn and raiders are more likely to be growing. Victimshardly change their training strategy after poaching and poaching seems be atransitory event. This is an important result for countries that intend to introduceapprenticeship-type training and need to convince firms to participate in training.