You can tell this is an ancient meme because it prices college at 4 years at $9,000 per year instead of 5 years at $30,000 per year 😆
You can tell this is an ancient meme because it prices college at 4 years at $9,000 per year instead of 5 years at $30,000 per year 😆
My experience of being on an apprenticeship (UK, a decade ago) was very negative.
TL;DR I was paid under minimum wage to do the work of an otherwise normal employee whilst not receiving any sort of training, or even any valuable experience really outside of “generic office job experience”. Eventually it progressed into me getting horribly overworked on top of attempted pressure to get me to do additional work which was not part of my job description. My apprenticeship agency (an external company which is meant to oversee the apprenticeship) did nothing to help me.
Full Story:
I was hired by a furniture logistics company, essentially filling in Excel spreadsheets so that our warehouse could pick out the correct furniture and put it in the correct vans. There were originally two people doing this job but they were very overworked so they decided to hire an apprentice to ease the pressure.
I basically was paid under minimum wage to do the exact same job as my two coworkers. Eventually one of my coworkers left for a job elsewhere so it was only me and one coworker left doing work that my employers already knew was too much work for two people (whilst I still continued to be paid under minimum wage).
On top of this my employer tried to add more work onto me by getting me doing customer service work (receiving calls from angry customers who hadn’t received the correct furniture). This was not part of the job description. I asked if I could go on a formal training course with my apprenticeship agency on how to handle customers and phone calls before I took on this responsibility (I had not received any sort of training in any of my work responsibilities).
In the meantime I was constantly messing up my spreadsheets because I was overworked and lacked experience and training, resulting in the wrong furniture getting delivered (a wardrobe could have a item ID of something like 123456788 and a set of drawers could have an item ID of 123456789 so it was easy to make mistakes when rushing).
This alongside my refusal to take on extra work through phone calls got me fired. This, I don’t think, is actually legal. You’re not meant to be able to fire apprentices for being crap at their job because they should be expected to be crap. You can only fire them for something grievous like turning up to work drunk.
I contacted my apprenticeship agency to describe the situation and that I had been fired unfairly. The apprenticeship agency said they “didn’t want to take any sides” so they “weren’t going to do anything” (essentially as good as taking the side of my now ex-employers).
I ended up going to university doing a Computer Sciences degree and I’m now £70k in debt with the interest added being much larger than what I can pay back. :/
Maybe my initial mistake with my apprenticeship was not doing something vocational and just doing some generic office work. Kinda wish I could go back in time and become a plumber or an electrician or something.
Edit: Grammar
UK businesses abuse the apprenticeship system for profit.
Like fucking Subway were taking on apprentices. Because making a sandwich clearly takes years of training, rather than about a day. Nothing to do with being able to pay them half the minimum wage, oh no, can’t be that.
But then “not in my job description” is something I stopped hearing when I left school. In the real world, your job is what your boss tells you to do (within reason), otherwise you don’t have a job any more.
Yeah absolutely. The good apprenticeships which give you valuable skills and experience are few and far between, and the ones that also pay you fairly are even rarer and I imagine are more contested than a place at university.
Yes, it’s true. I actually had another job between my apprenticeship ending and going to university where the job description was handing out leaflets. That was absolutely not what the job actually was so when I stubbornly refused to do nothing more than hand out my leaflets I got fired from that too.
I was but a bright-eyed 18 year old back then what can I say <\3 these days my spirit is crushed and I just do what I’m told (but at least I get paid a lot as a software developer).