Dual vocational education and training (VET) systems are renowned for their strong political support, high level of private-public cooperation, and smooth transitions into the labor market. However, the expanding general education at the upper-secondary level offers employers an alternative avenue of skill provision. Along with shifting educational preferences, the need for higher technical and general skills in some jobs, and the loss of interest for manual, traditionally blue-collar occupations, general education is gaining ground at the expense of vocational training. These trends are likely to engender skill mismatch, as well as skill shortage, problems even in the context of dual VET where such issues historically have been less pertinent. In this paper, we study training firms’ concerns with the dual VET system. We explore factors predicting firms’ worry about imminent skill shortage and how it is connected to dual vocational training and use novel survey data with 2’700 Swiss training firms). We link the survey data to data on local labor markets and institutionalized educational pathways. Our study contributes to the scholarly debate on skill shortage and skills mismatch problems, showing the which problems and solutions that are specific to firms given the type of work they train for.