Germany? I work with Germans and I always worry that their apprenticeships mean something different to what I have in mind. Do you have a link or something explaining how those skill levels are interpreted in your culture?
* start apprenticeship at 16 for 3-4 years; 3-4 days per week of being embedded in a company as apprentice, 1-2 days of staying in school
* at the end of apprenticeship you do a test, both theoretical and practical. your 'apprentice master' (Lehrmeister) is judging your practical skills in form of an apprentice project. Passing that you're the equivalent of journeyman.
* you can now either start working full time, or you go back to school for 1y to get the federal professional maturity test ('Berufsmatura'). This allows you to enter any higher vocational school in your field in the country.
* from here you go on to either do a vocational university, or you could even take another test and go full on academia (say to ETH Zurich, University, whatever). That gives you the equivalent of BSc or MSc, depending on where you go and how long you stay.
* On top of the bologna titles, there is also the 'federally certified' titles. Say you wanna be a certified construction manager, you go do a federal certificate and become one of ~2500 people in the country with that title. It's highly sought after and a sign of quality. Think of it like professional master titles given by the French state, if you reach that you should never have to worry finding a job. You'll generally be >30y old at that point.
And when you start a BSc at the earliest, you are something like 20 years old? (16 when you apprentice, 19 when you finish that, one more year plus two tests to enter university?)
20ish sounds about right - in Switzerland, men loose a year due to military/civil service.
To be honest, I find the idea of classifying people from journeyman to master rather unsuitable for today's knowledge work. It does not pass the smell-test for gate-keeping.
What you need to know changes every five years. Call someone grand-master of software engineering, sure, but no matter how great they are they'll not get your CRUD database UI done any faster - if their career was all about signal processing for particle accelerators and medical device certification. More likely, they'll over-engineer and over-spec and not be prepared for requirements to change completely after a year, or for sinking several days into CSS layout issues. Beyond a certain baseline of experience (say, working five years in the field or so), what counts is knowing the domain well (interpreting what the customer wants). Or already having experience with the technology that applies to problem-of-the-day. Or being highly motivated to learn it.
It's not like crafting with wood. The nature of wood doesn't change every six months. The tools we use to work wood don't change every six months.