Apprenticeships That Work

This was the practice when Britishers ruled the Nations in commonwealth and found very useful in Companies as well as Railways,Irrigation dept,Electricity provider etc This might have originated from UK. The apprentices became specialists in some areas and became Managers or Heads of departments. Some of them passed exams like City & guilds,Institution of Engineers and were better than those who graduated or diploma holders without apprenticeship. Even the Engineering Council of UK requires a period of training after education for appointment as Engineers. They never wasted time in studying subjects like Chemistry,Maths which are not very important for practical engineers. Nowadays there are custom made software for each application including Autocad.

One of the most successful Apprenticeship programs I have ever seen was the one run by the Panama Canal back in the days of US control- sadly, terminated when Panama took control of the canal.

The Panama Canal was (is) unique in the world- the only place you can learn about the guts of the system is at the Panama Canal. Not only did the Canal train all of its own personnel, someone who had completed a Canal Apprenticeship program could command top dollar anywhere in the world (assuming you could convince them to leave the Canal Zone).

Back in the day when I worked for a defense contractor in the Northeast USA, we had an apprentice program with Northwestern University. (The university still does this)

The students worked on real projects with real consequences and they were held responsible for the results. Successful students returned year after year and in almost every case were granted full time positions at a competitive salary. Knowing that these students had been trained in real world situations and that they knew how our company worked, was probably worth much more than the pay we gave them!

Apprenticeships have been around for 200 years or so, but they fell out of fashion in the UK about 40 years ago, now they are comming back into fashion, but they are not the same as before, for the first they do not last for long, whereas 50 years ago when I did mine it took four years, and they do not do so much on the technical theory!