| We have roughly this concept in my org (field consulting for a major cloud provider). I've been very involved on the training side and on having people directly on my team. Some notes from my experience 1) We still have a pretty intense interview process. We largely aren't taking people from code camps, but people with programming experience in university but who may have not been CS majors. 2) To work, it is necessarily VERY labor intensive. I ask teams taking on of our early "apprentices" to expect to have a senior level person spend at least an hour a day with them for at least a month, and multiple hours a week for a year. 3) You need to have long timelines- On-boarding is hard with well trained with lots of experience. In my experience, "apprentices" often take 6 months plus to be value adding. For a project that will be over in 8 months, this can be hard to swallow. The program and adoption has to be driven at a strategic level. 4) The benefits of the apprenticeship program often do not accrue to the group doing the investment. If it takes 6 months to get someone to the point where there are adding value on average and then another 6 months to the point where they are more than covering their salary and cost, then they are a year into the position. We see a lot of our people choosing to transition at around 18 - 24 months in role. We just sunk a ton of time into people to get them competent, but the benefits of that training are going to another group or company and would have been better off hiring no one. 5) Despite all the above, many of the best people in my org have come through the program. Beyond just being good at their jobs, they bring a diversity of background and experience that really adds our ability to execute on problems. I'm a big supporter of apprenticeship type programs and think they pay off in the end, but as I've described there are a lot of failure points along the way. |