Hacker News Reader

>"Any American-style apprenticeship model will need to deal effectively with the age-old problem of the “runaway apprentice” — the apprentice who leaves his employer after the employer has invested time and energy in training him, but before the apprentice has been useful enough to make the employer’s investment worthwhile."

How is it that they are skilled enough to be useful at one employer but not the other?

View on HN

The point is that they are useful at multiple employers. An employer, when training an apprentice, incurs a cost in doing so, but cannot be sure that they'll be able to recoup the cost if the apprentice leaves soon after finishing training.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-academy-pay-20...

Many small cities do not have police academies. They just hire the graduates from other cities. This is similar to the problem of apprentices leaving.

That's a tricky line to tread when you think about it. Who decides when the employer has met his costs?

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? At the outset, not only is it hard to tell whether an apprentice will stay once trained, but also whether they'll be any good at what they're being trained to do. It's doubly risky, which explains a lot of the reluctance to take on apprentices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com