[junto]

The apprenticeships schemes are great, but very very rigid. This is fine when you are learning to become a Tischler (joiner or cabinet maker) because the techniques of joining haven't changed much in the last 100 years, so if your apprenticeship under a Meister Tischler take 5 years then the technology is still the same.

Try that with IT. Did MongoDb exist 5 years ago? Did Node.js? The list is endless.

Information Technology moves too fast for the German style and concept of apprenticeships (in my opinion). There are apprenticeships for Informatik, but I see them much like undergraduate Computer Science courses.

My experience of CS undergraduate studies are that you will learn the basic concepts, and a bunch of bullshit thrown in that you'll never use again in the workplace, but that is about it.

[walshemj]

So you do an apprenticeship to learn the basic underlying principals of the trade/profession not to get taught by rote the latest new shiny thing (tm).

Having more people who have been taught properly from first principals rather than only learning the latest trendy thing woudl be a very good idea! You would certainly have less of the "developers who cant program fizz buzz problems"

And I would expect a competent person to be able to pick up mongodb or nodejs even before they had finished the 4 year apprenticeship.

I started my career on the vocational track track (in mech eng) and on my second day at work they said "pop down the the company library there is a book on FORTRAN learn it"