Apprenticeships

Four years at the bench

An apprentice is assigned to a trade and to a maker, who teaches them at the next bench for four years. The first year is spent on a single exercise, which in most trades is to make one part, by hand, until the Master of the Atelier can find nothing to say about it. The President’s first exercise, in 1965, was an escapement wheel. It took him a year.

In the second and third years apprentices work on the house’s pieces under their maker’s eye, and their names go on the certificates. In the fourth they make a piece of their own, which the Master examines in the presence of the maker and two Associates.

The trades

For 2027 the house will take apprentices in seven trades: ocularist, feather-setter, movement maker, hand-maker, engraver, enameler and cabinetmaker. Tuners will not be taken while the Penfield Mk IV is suspended, and leatherwork has a full bench.

Who may apply

Anyone over sixteen. No qualifications are required and none are asked for. The house looks for patience, steady hands, good eyesight, corrected if need be, and the ability to do one thing for a long time without becoming bored by it, which is rarer than any of the others.

Pay and terms

Apprentices are paid $41,600 in the first year, rising each year to $52,000 in the fourth, and receive the same vacation, lunch and pension as every other member of the house. An apprentice who completes the four years is offered a bench.

Three apprentices

Inés Barragán came to the house in 2023 at twenty-nine, after eight years as a surgical nurse in a Seattle hospital, and is in her fourth year as an apprentice hand-maker. Her first-year exercise was a single knuckle joint, filed and fitted until it moved without play in any direction; she made nineteen before the Master passed one. She is now making her own piece for the examination, a hand that can hold a pencil, and says the surgical training helps less than people expect, because a hand-maker can take the patient apart.

Walter Ng, a retired locksmith, applied at sixty-one in 2024 and was taken on as an apprentice movement maker, the oldest the house has accepted. His first exercise was the same escapement wheel that the President filed in 1965. He finished it in seven months and has asked that this be recorded without comparison.

Dara Flynn applied at seventeen in 2025 with a working model of the Copyist made from a shoebox, a bicycle chain and the cams of a toy music box, which wrote the first word of Article I before it jammed. She is a first-year apprentice engraver, and her exercise this year is the house mark, cut in steel at the size of a fingernail. The shoebox Copyist is on a shelf in the Atelier.

The examination

The Master has examined 198 apprentices since 2006 and failed four. Each has been written to every Christmas since, and two have since returned to the house in other trades.

How to apply

Write to apprenticeships@rosenassociation.org by 15 January 2027 with a letter about yourself and something you have made: a drawing, a photograph of a repair, a piece of knitting, a model. The house will invite about sixty applicants to spend a day at the Atelier in February, and will write to every applicant, whether invited or not.