Adults seduced by CAP

Blue kitchen apron and chef’s knife in hand, Dominic Quirke Cisèle, size, emance in the kitchen of his Nantes restaurant. The 56 -year -old chief opened his own establishment, Pickles, in 2014. A 180 degree turn for him who, a few years earlier, was still working in the Capgemini consulting firm. “This job, I hadn’t really chosen it,” he says.

After the bac, he follows the movement: all his friends go to college, he enrolled in computer license, without conviction. Against all expectations, he is doing well, won a position quickly, and remains in this sector for fifteen years. Until the time of rocking. “I understood that in this stage of my career, I had to enter political games to continue to evolve, and I had no desire.”

Dominic needs concrete, commitment, to do with his hands. A short internship in the kitchen acts as a click. He took the plunge and prepares his retraining for three years, to spend a CAP Cuisine over eight months.

The interest of this training for Dominic? Its practical side, concretized by its four months spent in a restaurant. “I wanted to see if I was able to assume the pressure of the service, to produce, but also to know if I really had talent, this thing more to feel legitimate.” He will find it more than that: “I who have always been carried, for the first time, I was an actor. I was no longer hesitated, I was confident. “

Today he knows exactly why he does this job. Neither for a Michelin star nor for recognition. He cooks to nourish people and to satisfy an “unreasonable need to please”.

Find a use in everyday life

This “quest for meaning”, which has become a consecrated expression, often returns to the stories of retraining. In 2025, 47 % of active French people envisaged or prepare a professional retraining, according to Center Inffo, an association under the supervision of the State Secretariat for Vocational Training. And not only after a burnout or a dismissal.

Antoine Dain, sociologist and associate researcher at the social ties research center, regularly observes it: after several years in the same activity, weariness settles. The need to experiment emerges. “What people are looking for,” he explains, “is to see the impact of their work immediately, its useful usefulness.”

The CAP, with its short and practical training, offers an ideal springboard. Initially designed at the beginning of the last century to train young apprentices in trades as a qualified worker over two years, the oldest professional diploma in France widened its audience in the 1970s.

Adults in professional retraining or continuing education were able to start benefiting from specific courses, over a shorter period – eight months on average. According to assessments of specialized sites, they now represent around 7 % of students in this sector, which generally ensures good professional reintegration afterwards.

Côme Desgrées du Loû worked in international security. Regular trips abroad, good situation, position coherent with his training. He was where he “had to” be. And yet, as thirty approaches, a desire arises. Work with your hands. Come back to the concrete. Having a job “with a real relationship between what we do and what we win”.

Hunting gave him a taste for the work of meat. And he has rubbed shoulders with agriculture and breeding since childhood, with his grandmother, in Lot-et-Garonne. Then some meetings comfort him: he will open a butcher’s shop. But not just any. A peasant, artisanal butcher’s shop. He wants to receive whole animals, cut them down, select his producers, organic and local, which he will have met.

Be well surrounded

Côme leaves Paris with his partner, settles in Loire-Atlantique, passes his butcher’s CAP, and opens his business barely a year later. Seven years have passed, a second butcher’s shop was born. “It was perhaps a little unconscious to get started like that,” he smiles, but if it was to do, he would not change anything.

However, to go from employee to business manager, moreover in an artisanal profession, is not self -evident. The CAP forms qualified workers. He transmits technical know-how, not the keys to managing a business. “It is not rocket science either, we are not talking about a box of CAC 40, but we must manage stress, cash, doubts, human resources, constant fatigue …”, confides Côme, installing a ham of several pounds on her branch.

“There is a difference between the idealized vision of the profession and the real, extension hours, physical effort”, which can lead to abandonment. Better to be well surrounded. Socially, the status of business manager is not comparable to that of employee in crafts. Increased autonomy, choice of schedules, absence of hierarchy, “it is a way of reducing dissatisfaction at work and no longer having the feeling of being a pawn on the chessboard,” said Antoine Dain.

Training engineer, Quentin de Boissieu is bored after having delivered his latest project. Impossible to continue except “to fart the lead at 40”. The 30 -year -old has always envied his relatives animated by a passion. He does not have one, but by dreamed in front of the window of his office, two ideas are essential: sailing and wood. Sailing will remain a hobby but wood … Since childhood, it has made boat models.

When his company implements a job safeguard plan, Quentin jumps at the opportunity and begins a CAP carpentry with the Companions du Devoir. “A fairly short and concrete training essential for conversions,” said Lionel Madec, commercial director of the CNED (National Distance Education Center), where CAPs represent 10 % of adult learners.

After eight months of training – three -quarters in internship in a company in Limoges to work on solid wood -, “returning to school benches was not easy”, admits Quentin. But work in the workshop was worth it. The contact of the material, learn to read wood, know how it will behave, all compensates “the physical fatigue that we are not used to,” he says.

For four years, this 30 -year -old has the chance to work from oak and massive ash on a daily basis in his Nantes workshop. See a detailed whole trunk arrive in trays, choose what each room will be used for, create a piece of furniture that will be transmitted from generation to generation, it is proud of it.

What about money? He has less than before, it’s true. But its criteria have changed. “I earn a better life because each of my days is a day when I am happy.”