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America has more than 6 million vacant jobs, yet the country is "facing a serious skills gap," Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta recently said. And last week his boss, President Donald Trump, said he wants to close this gap by directing $100 million of federal money into apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships in the U.S. are generally known for training workers for blue collar jobs like plumbers or electricians, but with a little tweak, they could be the path to lucrative, white collar tech jobs across the country. Not just in coastal cities, but also in the Midwest, South, and across the Great Plains.
But to get there we need to erase the notion that highly paid jobs require a college degree. It's not always true. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, among others, has called for a shift in focus: "skills, not degrees. It's not skills at the exclusion of degrees. It's just expanding our perspective to go beyond degrees."
An academic degree signals to employers that a person has successfully completed a course of study, but it does not provide a clear assessment of someone's skills. Companies, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, are shifting their recruiting process from "where did you study?" to "what can you do?".
Germans have long cited their apprenticeship system as a factor in their economic success. Would it help America and elsewhere, too?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:47PM (17 children)
Long past due. I've been bitching about this since the '90s.
Programmers, admins, data centre maintenance - all those and related groups could and should be trained by apprenticeship. A modern apprenticeship includes classroom time, so you can get in your classes on big-O notation, and computer organisation, and different classes of languages (machine code, asm, procedural, modular, object, flow, functional, logic, stack ....), management of network cables and electrical cables and fibre and all that good stuff.
And then you can go and put it into practice under the eye of a master who has a couple of decades of experience.
And then if you really want to, you can push for training in the sciences. Because hey, why not? But you don't end up with masses of study debt, you do have XX years of experience with real technology, and you're productive.
Makes sense now; made sense then. Should have been done when Reagan was in office, really.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:04PM (14 children)
It was done when Reagan was in office. I was self taught, as was about half the programmers at my company. Started with 8086 assembly, moved to C.
Decided to go to college in my mid-20's when I realized that if I ever wanted a different job I was gonna have to have that useless piece of paper.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:09PM (8 children)
> I realized that if I ever wanted a different job I was gonna have to have that useless piece of paper
A bit self-contradictory, isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:45PM (7 children)
No, HR departments rely on pieces of paper because they are incapable of doing their job.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:52PM (6 children)
If they rely on the pieces of paper, said paper is not useless, descriptivist-ly.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:06PM (5 children)
Wrong, they shouldn't be relying on pieces of paper. Who do you think would be the best employee for a programming role; a self taught programmer with a couple of reasonably successful open source projects to his name or a CS grad who never did any coding before he started his degree?
We don't know but assuming no serious personality flaws, the person who was already successful purely off their own initiative is the first guy I'd want to interview.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:21PM
When I started my coding career I feared all the competition from CS grads.
After a couple years I learned not to worry because in my actual experience, recent CS grads couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:55PM (3 children)
> Wrong, they shouldn't be relying on pieces of paper.
Yet they do, which makes the paper useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @12:47AM (1 child)
Maybe, but I refuse to participate in that game on principle. Others should do the same, or this stupidity will never end. If the employer requires a degree for a job that doesn't need it, they are not worth working for anyway.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 30 2017, @05:22PM
Well good luck with your idealistic one-man crusade on that.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 30 2017, @02:38PM
This AC obviously has never heard of Descriptivism :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:43PM (3 children)
It was not done under Reagan, he defunded and ruined the more open exploration of higher education. What you're imagining happened is that defunding education caused more people to pursue apprenticeship type programs. It was supposed to be the glory of the free market for people to educate themselves. "I was self taught" well good for you, not everyone can manage that and things have gotten more complex (and simpler). You are in the heyday of the digital revolution, your hobby just had extreme market value. Superiority badge denied.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @03:56AM (2 children)
How does that work? Colleges can operate without government funding.
Apprenticeship programs aren't self-education. And let us note that post-graduate education heavily features apprenticeship programs (that is, the graduate student-advisor relationship that is widely prevalent throughout masters and doctorate programs, no matter the field).
So what? Self-learning is an important skill whether you learn it in college or on your own. Someone who has learned it on their own should get some respect for that. It's hard to do (as you say, "not everyone can manage that"). Someone who can self-learn is superior intellectually in a number of ways to someone who can't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @05:02AM (1 child)
Colleges aren't affordable without a massive amount of financial aid and/or government funding.
Back in the '80s it was still possible to fund a college degree by just working hard in the summers. These days you can't do that. The government subsidies have shrunk to the point where it now costs far more than you could possibly hope to earn during the summer and without grants and loans you're basically out of luck.
It's even worse when you consider how many jobs have BS diploma requirements just to get an application read by a "human" in HR, let alone the actual hiring manager.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @05:43AM
Unless, of course, you go to colleges that aren't that expensive.
I'll note here that the grandparent post alluded to "open exploration" which apparently was some sort of experimentation in college that was abruptly halted by the cessation of government funding. I'd like to know more about this program or culture.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:08AM
Otoh, if you got a really marketable idea. Then that piece of paper won't matter much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:23PM (1 child)
There seems to be a shortage of programmers with couple decades of experience with Scale or Go....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:16PM
Right. Astute observation.
The idea isn't to have an apprentice Go programmer. The idea is to have an apprentice programmer. A programmer who can't move to a flow control language, to an aspect oriented language, to a functional language, to a stack language, isn't a real programmer. And that's what an apprenticeship should cover.