I just started a software development apprenticeship at my company and it's going amazingly. Recruitment for other development positions generally cost $1000+ and really didn't give us anyone impressive (our good candidates/people came from active recruiting). I used ad-words for $120 and indeed for $40 and got over 100 applications for my development apprenticeship.<p>We chose people with skills and experience we wanted, and selected for traits we felt would make good developers. (Passionate about learning for example). From the start we've been able to really teach good habits as well as focus on how we do things (testing, continuous integration, version control, etc). Some of the exercises involve rebuilding key components from management systems with the hopes we'll have not only great programmers, but experts on our business when they go from apprentices to full time developers. We're also going to get exactly the employees we want, starting from desirable employees with very little to no programming experience.<p>If anyone is interested in starting a similar program, I will be more than happy to share my materials, some of the things I would change about what I've done so far, etc. I highly recommend it. The cost is relatively low, we balance the pay with the fact that the people instructing can't do work while they're teaching/helping - so during the apprenticeship it's basically a decently paid internship. They're already producing higher quality work than we've gotten from any outsourcing we've done - we'll be finishing a project by the end of the program that we completely controlled the quality of, got an MVP done pretty inexpensively, and we'll have basically custom built the team for that application. All while teaching the group an entirely new career, I've seen what investing in career growth via continuing studies can do for employee retention, I really think that taking it to this level will give us some great retention numbers in the near future as well.
Apprenticeships give people more viable skills than probably 75% of majors at four year universities. The fact is that you have an enormous glut of college graduates who studied sociology, political science, and communication who can't find work in anything related to what they studied so they end up working at a tech company doing customer service, doing a nursing program, working as bartenders, or as we all know learning how to program.
As a born-and-raised-and-still-living-here South Carolinian, it's always nice to see "positive" coverage of my state.<p>Speaking to the article itself, I can't imagine having gone through one of these instead of college; I was too set in the college mindset at the time and still treasure the experience (though I'm well aware of its shortcomings). On the other hand, any sort of "learn on the job" scenario would have been TREMENDOUSLY welcome a year and a half ago when I was suddenly without work and struggling to break out of the ".NET Programmer" label. Keeping this sort of option open to everyone can only be a good thing.