I wonder how in the long run...

Three ideas about this topic, in no particular order :

The future for mass market watch servicing is... None I think. I believe that powermatic 80, seiko 6r and 4r, etc are thrown and replaced at service.

Independence for watch repair is actively discouraged by multiple factors, some are described in the post above. Some are more country specific but in a nutshell, you need to have a pile of cash already at hand to think about starting an activity which does not pay very well, and also think very hard about what kind of watches you want to take.

What will happen in 10 years to all those custom, in house, etc watches and movements churned out today with no publicly available parts and few qualified people? Not sure their value and usability will be very high in the medium term.

Congrats on your path to becoming a watchmaker! Wish you the best of luck.

Interesting that this is only 1 year long...looked at it and it appears to be a stripped down version of the normal 2 year watchmaker program.

I guess this is one way that WOSTEP is helping to reduce the burden to get the basics needed to work in a factory service facility. This is likely all you would need to work in a factory setting.


Most of the big companies have corporate sponsored schools. I can't speak to what watchmakers in the factory service centers make, but I see advertisements for watchmaker positions that are $100k US plus benefits for larger jewellery chains in the US.


Agreed - you will see more movements that are simply replaced, rather than serviced. There's also processes at many brands where basically unskilled workers are used for assembling things like hands, dials, and case work and a trained watch maker does only the movement work. Or selective assembly where even the movement is assembled by unskilled workers, who are taught just one small parts of the job and do it on an assembly line type set-up. The watchmaker only does the final adjusting.

If anything, the large brands are trying to minimize the need for trained watchmakers.

Personally, I don't like closed silos so for a modern watch I only look at generic movements with plenty of spare parts or at brands that keep their parts readily available... Rolex being some kind of an exception, parts seem available without too much looking.

Congratulations on choosing to follow a career as a watchmaker @ecarpino. It will probably be challenging at the start but I hope that in time you will be happy and successful, either as an independent business owner or working for a shop or service center.

The industry went through this in the 1990s. That is when programs like WOSTEP were created. I suspect similar things happened in the 17th century when watches started to be mass produced and were seen as a status symbol. By the 18th century there was an industry so that by the end of that era anyone who wanted a watch could have one. Before the latter part of the 18th century and navigation no one really Needed a watch any more than they do today in the age of GPS and Network Time Servers.

According to the old trade magazines, what really set off the independent watchmaking programs was the GI bill in the 1940s after the war. Watchmaking schools qualified. Money was cheap and intrest rates low so one could own their own shop. So there was an explosion of corespondence schools. Most of the big cities like New Your, San Francisco, and Chigago had them as part of their trade school offerings.

I was told I was too old to take the program. (I was also working in tech namely Apple. But one had to find a new contract every 18 months or so.) For me watchmaking was a way to relax after a day of work. As noted I also took jewlry classes on the weekends.

Many of my mentors were also basically self taught. Still they did take the time to teach me some of the basics. The rest I learned from Books and trade magazines.

The old guys could afford to keep the prices low as they had been in buisness for decades. At the time I also saw a lot of cut throat competition for the dwindling supply of customers. From the threads here this may be more mitigated now. I personally saw a lot of positive data sharing by most of the people I was in contact with. There were a few who wanted it all for themselevs.

I suspect what we are seeing is part of a larger set of thirty year cycles. My mentors were able to have access to some really nice stuff. Some of it from the 18th and early 19th century. Some of this was cleaned up for the local San Francisco musuem. By the time I came along the material was shoved into safes and back storage as it was not part of the museum's mission. In the end one of my mentors was able to work out a perminate loan not the NAWCC musuem in PA.

In the 1950s this stuff was on display for anyone in San Francisco to see. So this adds to changes in attitudes. Without exposure to the items. Few are inspired to learn more.

The internet may have changed this. Now the information is easier in a way to access. Books what cost 100s of dollars can be found or shared through digital editions.

There are also billions of watches out there. With hundreds of thousands if not millions more made every year. Most of these of course are of the low end sort. Throwaway items. I recently did get some Swatches to see how unrepairable they are. Pin levers from the 1970s on the other hand can be repaired. Even ladies watches which had a shelf life of a few weeks can retain value.

The higher end modern stuff from the early part of this century starting in the mid 1990s are a different matter. These were designed to be "factory" serviced. Unlike watches say before the 1960s these require special materials. Namley the oils, some of the springs are complex alloys. It might be interesting to make an quick poll study as to what fails the most. Is the value in the case hands and dial? Or does the movement mean something? I have always favored the movement (and dial) as many cases were scrapped or damaged.

I do think that watchmaking and self servicing of one's own collection is the way things in the future will go. It would be nice if the manufactures did open up the parts supply again. Which is probably not likely to happen as history has shown the availability of parts leads to the creation of the desirable items collectors want. There will probably remain a system of quick fix artists to aid the filppers in the desire of a quick profit. I suspect this was just as true in the 16th and 17th centuries as it is now.

Was learning about the fiber laser at the local makerspace this week. I have a long list of projects for the CO2 laser. There is also a plasma cutter on the way. I am also aware of the resin printing technologies what use LCD screens to set the resins. So it is probable that this tech will evolve. Several years ago I saw the Metal printers at spaceX which is probably not unlike a 17th century watch in availability and access.

One piece of tech that changed watchmaking in the 1990s was the USB microscope. Many of my mentors no longer worked on watches as their eyesight was no longer good enough. While one can not use a USB scope for general basic work. They work well for the final inspection.

Improvements in CAD/CAM will also affect parts availability. Back in the late 1990s I started to digitize and create virtual models of watches. I got bogged down with dial repairing. On the other hand I am working with this data again. And If I am working on it; I suspect at least three others are as well.

It really does take a village. (Which is something I think the Swiss know well.)

About 80% of the watches purchased in 2023 will not live past the day when a new cell will no longer make them run. No need for watchmakers, there!

About half the remainder of watches that are sold in 2023, parts will be held back by the manufacturers. Opportunities for only a few watchmakers, there. The other half of the remainder are likely antique and vintage. I thank my lucky stars I learned this craft when you needed a lathe, staking tool, poising tool, truing calipers, Seitz jewelling tool, and a large stash of donor watches for when you need material you can’t get! I have all those things, plus obsolete antique tools that come in handy.

I remember that MacLeans magazine (Canadian) published an article about 60 years ago which related to trades that had no future. They listed watchmakers as an endangered species! All because of the “disposable” watch which nobody fixes. I’m pleased to say that, if watchmaking is an obsolete skill, I’ve never been busier! Maybe because there are so few of us left?

I'm pretty sure WOSTEP goes back much further than that, my watchmaker and friend got his training there (Neuchatel) in the 70s, IIRC.

The school {WOSTEP] has been around forever. I think there were a dozen or more schools. I was thinking more how they revamped it and modernized it when I toured it in the 1990s. What I was trying to imply is some of the modern attitudes towards watchmaking date from this time. That they knew there was going to be a crisis after the quartz shakeup in the 1970/1980s. It is these programs I am referring to.

Watchmaking has always been about material science. The old guys trusted their whale oil. Now we have all sorts of synthetics. That is probably the most critical thing.

Maybe you are thinking of the era where WOSTEP was expanding and opening schools outside of Switzerland?