
Boosting apprenticeships - jseliger
http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/
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I did an apprenticeship in software engineering in Switzerland. Afterwards I
did not go to university.

My experience was positive. I did not make a lot of money during my
apprenticeship but that was before I was 20 years old and still lived at home.

Since then I make the same as others with bachelor/masters degree in the same
company. Though at the beginning my salary was quite a bit lower.

The jobs I can take are also somewhat limited, since I won't be hired for a
machine learning job that requires lots of math.

Still, I barely had the grades for my apprenticeship and I also barely made it
through. So ultimately if it wasn't for my apprenticeship I probably would
have an office job that is much more boring.

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igk
Intersting. Do you know what is required to take on apprentices? If I moved to
switzerland and started a company there, could I just start training people?

~~~
href
Not quite. There are two requirements.

First is a "Ausbildungsbewilligung" from the canton your company resides in.
This is basically a cert that verifies that your company is able to provide an
apprentice with the proper environment.

Depending on the canton this can mean that your company needs to be of a
certain age (e.g. two years) and that the work that you are doing actually
qualifies your company to provide the apprentice with relevant skills (so a
restaurant can't train engineers).

The second requirement is a person that has completed the "Berufsbildner"
course. I haven't done it myself, but from what I hear it's a one-two weeks
course that teaches you the basics of the apprenticeship system (your rights
and duties).

After that you hire a 15-16 year old you think would be a good fit.

The first two years the kid will be in school for up to three days a week and
you will probably pay a salary of around 500 - 1000 CHF (you would usually
increase the amount each year).

The second two years (assuming you are training a software engineer) you might
pay a bit more, but by then you might be lucky and the teenager is a young
adult that can do good work for cheap.

Of course 16-20 is a time where lots of things change, so you might not be so
lucky. From my experience you can't predict this either. I've seen kids that
started great and dropped out later and troubled kids that found their calling
in year three.

To find out more you want to search the web for "Ausbildungsbewilligung",
"Lehrbetrieb werden" and "Berufsbildner". From what I've seen all information
is in German/French however. I didn't find any good sites in English.

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jasode
More apprenticeships would be better but there's also a tendency to
overestimate their ability to solve economic problems that colleges failed at.

First the good: if we just look at apprenticeship in isolation for its
curriculum content, this will be superior for many students because they learn
material that's more closely tied to the jobs they will do. The
apprenticeships will probably cost much less that 4-year colleges. (I asked my
heating-air-conditioning technician how much his "apprentice" schooling cost
and he said $15k. He's age 25 and still paying back the school loan.)

Then there's the bad: the overestimation of positive effects to the employment
economy. There are 2 separate factors: (1) zero-sum game of job opportunities
mapped to job seekers, and (2) social rank

I previously commented about (1).[1] Basically, there's an underlying tendency
for humans to "rank" other humans and whether you make "college available to
everyone for free" or "emphasize apprenticeships over college", it doesn't
change that underlying sorting mechanism. There will always be a gradient from
the very desirable apprenticeship programs down to the low-end apprenticeships
that people only take because they don't want to clean toilets. Those unequal
preferences forces a sorting mechanism on society.

I also previously commented about (2).[2] Essentially, the new apprenticeships
will not command the same social prestige as traditional colleges.

But that said, if we ignore (1) and (2), apprenticeships may be an overall net
gain for society.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10561911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10561911)

[2] my 3 replies explains Jeffrey J. Selingo proposed remapping of "degree" to
"apprenticeship":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13520826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13520826)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521075](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521075)

~~~
jseliger
> More apprenticeships would be better but there's also a tendency to
> overestimate their ability to solve economic problems that colleges failed
> at.

I'm the original writer and I definitely agree that they're not a panacea. But
I would argue that they're a movement in the right direction, especially in
the "college for everyone" world:

 _Apprenticeships are also an obviously good idea from the perspective of
academia; anyone who teaches college students at schools below the most elite
level knows that a large number of students really shouldn’t be in college.
This was most obvious to me at the University of Arizona, but it happens
across the academic landscape. I’ve been teaching undergrads for ten years,
and it’s clear that many undergrads don’t know why they’re in college, don’t
care about school, and are floundering in an academic milieu._

The debt students take to get degrees of dubious value, or, worse, to drop out
after two years, is staggering.

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hugs
Are there apprenticeship (or bootcamp-style) programs for hardware? I'm
imagining a "maker" focused program where instead of learning to make web
apps, one learns 3D design, 3D printing, milling and laser cutting, electronic
circuit design, and microcontroller programming.

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RugnirViking
As someone who recently completed an apprenticeship in the UK for software
engineering, I feel I was essentially used for cheap labor, sure I learned
things, but the same things I would learn just doing an ordinary job.

The one remaining argument for apprenticeships are that they help you break
into the job market, but I feel like for many skilled jobs, like the ones
listed here, if you already have some skill or talent (usually a requirement
for the apprenticeship) your time would be better spent being a bit more
persistent looking for a job

The result? I'm going to university anyway. Employers continue to pay me less
because I don't have a degree, and say so to _to my face_

~~~
Dayshine
>but the same things I would learn just doing an ordinary job.

What about the coursework and classes your provider made you do? Our
apprentices have something like 1 day in 10 at college and have to do
coursework projects through the course of the apprenticeship.

~~~
RugnirViking
It was preposterously basic, and it was only a couple days in the entire
duration of the apprenticeship.

The only one I found in any way useful was the SQL course that lasted a couple
days but that's still something I could have just asked a colleague to give me
a quick rundown of.

Essentially, I would have hoped that what I was taught outside of the work
would be theory, such as data structures and stuff, but instead I got
extremely basic introductions to existing programming languages that I for the
most part either knew or could learn the basics in a couple hours.

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walshemj
The problem is going be based on the uk experience mc job employers will jump
on the band wagon to get cheap labour at under the minimum wage eg apprentice
supermarket assistants or baristas.

~~~
chopin
In Germany, apprenticeship is only possible for selected jobs and rely heavy
regulation. It has its warts but I think it is a net positive.

