Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

Apprenticeships are surprisingly suitable for highly skilled professions as well.

I work at a creative agency in London and we started taking in apprentices a few years ago, with great success.

In my opinion, apprenticeships work best for people who either already know they are interested in a particular craft and want to specialise quickly or for people who don't know what they want at all and want to try out a career before committing.

I work in UX myself and while there is definitely a place for solid theoretical foundations, I have found that it's a field that develops so quickly that experience is much more important than knowledge. Because of this, it's very suitable for the kind of on the job training that apprenticeships offer.

Personally, I loved every minute I spent in an academic environment at university. I know it shaped my thinking and personality in very real ways and I enjoyed the freedom of doing research without direct applications (while getting my practical fix through part time jobs on the side). If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea because you are more practical, you can totally skip it if you can get a relevant apprenticeship with solid mentorship and genuine job opportunity at the end of it.

I work with two people who entered in apprenticeships at my company instead of going to university (saving a load of cash) and they both have since been offered permanent positions. I don't know how their long term career prospects are, but I would definitely hire them over a recent graduate with 0 years of experience under their belt.

In Switzerland it's common to start an apprenticeship after 9 years of school if you have an idea what you want to do. Turning just sweet sixteen I did one myself as an "Application Developer" in the airline industry. This lasted four years and gave me some kind of diploma - not exactly a degree in CS, but I gained enough experience to get a well paid job with some responsibilities afterwards. During the apprenticeship the salary is more or less symbolic. Now at the age of 30 I've almost 10 years of experience in the real world, and never had any debt to pay off (although higher education is also very affordable in Switzerland). The nature of software engineering (e.g. contributing to open source projects, learning by doing, etc.), a sense of responsibility and a natural hunger for wisdom is in my experience enough material for a good position. Many of my friends, including myself, never did a bachelor or master degree but became great engineers and project leaders nevertheless. What often matters more than deep theoretical understanding is actually doing things such as dealing with pressure, deadlines and customers, getting along with a team and solving complex problems in an pragmatic way, because that's what actually happens in most of the jobs. I don't say this is the better way to go, instead I want to say that having a certain academic degree should not be seen as the only promising career path.

Same here. It works really well if you are passionate about what you do.

You can definitely be an effective professional software engineer via apprenticeship. For me, being able to get into the workforce and then double back via the university to get more fundamental / theoretical training in computer science was much preferable to taking the traditional route.

I was a high school teacher in a past life and always felt like apprenticeship would be an excellent model to replace the very-much-flawed teaching credentialing system.

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