You’re dreaming of crafting high-performance shoes with your own hands for top athletes like Lionel Messi, Jude Bellingham, Florian Wirtz or Olga Carmona? Or you’d like to turn designs, drawings and renderings of our designers into real products later as a shoe developer or shoe constructor? Then the apprenticeship as Shoemaker is exactly the right fit for you.
In this apprenticeship, you’ll do more than learn a traditional craft — you’ll lay the foundation for an (inter)national career as a specialist or future leader in the sporting goods industry.
You’ll learn from the very best how a finished shoe is created step by step.
You’ll experience every key stage of the process: from cutting and stitching leather, to getting to know and applying different outsoles, exploring material science, and performing final and quality checks on the finished products.
You’ll also rotate across different areas and teams within adidas — gaining hands-on experience, new perspectives, and a deep understanding of what it takes to craft performance from start to finish.
In the small town of Scheinfeld in Middle Franconia – around 40 kilometers from adidas’ global headquarters in Herzogenaurach – adidas has been running its own shoe factory since 1959. Alongside mass production and made-to-measure manufacturing for elite athletes, the site also hosts our training center for shoemaker apprentices. This is where our apprentices spend the majority of their time during their training.
HERZOGENAURACH: At adidas’ global headquarters in Herzogenaurach, apprentices also complete part of their practical rotations during the program.
PIRMASENS: The city of Pirmasens in Rhineland-Palatinate is the center for training and education in the German footwear industry. Our apprentices receive their classroom instruction at the German Footwear College (Deutsche Schuhfachschule), which also hosts the advanced training programs for aspiring footwear technicians.