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The trade apprenticeship programs I directed were marketed to inexperienced people wanting to begin training. The only requirement was that the person could read. I visited an area once where they even had to teach the carpentry students how to measure. They had little blocks made that measured a foot, an inch, a quarter inch! Some of the guys were starting at that low a level. So if you have a high school diploma or a GED you can easily learn a trade. Plumbers are always in demand! Yes, it takes a little time away from your family but you are learning a skill that will help you provide for them. It's not a lot of time on the whole. If you can get on with a member employer you will start out at the lowest wage as a helper, everyone does. But remember, you don't know anything! You work during the day as a helper, learning stuff on the job. You go to school two nights a week learning more stuff that will get you increasingly better pay. It is not like the old days of apprenticeship where you sign your life away for seven years! These programs help people provide for their families. It may not be the job you dreamed about when you were fifteen, or even twenty-one, but it is an honest living and it puts food on the table. Our gandparents and great grandparents had dreams that never happened when they had to leave school in third grade to support their families. They did what they had to do and used their intelligence to succeed. Think outside the box. This might not be the kind of job you always wanted but it might be something you like doing!
The trade apprenticeship programs I directed were marketed to inexperienced people wanting to begin training. The only requirement was that the person could read. I visited an area once where they even had to teach the carpentry students how to measure. They had little blocks made that measured a foot, an inch, a quarter inch! Some of the guys were starting at that low a level. So if you have a high school diploma or a GED you can easily learn a trade. Plumbers are always in demand! Yes, it takes a little time away from your family but you are learning a skill that will help you provide for them. It's not a lot of time on the whole. If you can get on with a member employer you will start out at the lowest wage as a helper, everyone does. But remember, you don't know anything! You work during the day as a helper, learning stuff on the job. You go to school two nights a week learning more stuff that will get you increasingly better pay. It is not like the old days of apprenticeship where you sign your life away for seven years! These programs help people provide for their families. It may not be the job you dreamed about when you were fifteen, or even twenty-one, but it is an honest living and it puts food on the table. Our gandparents and great grandparents had dreams that never happened when they had to leave school in third grade to support their families. They did what they had to do and used their intelligence to succeed. Think outside the box. This might not be the kind of job you always wanted but it might be something you like doing!
Sounds like you training for low paying helper positions. 25K a year job on the high end. Nothing wrong with starting out on the bottom, but what makes this an "apprenticeship" program exactly? I mean, if someone has to start out by using blocks of common measurement denominations, they probably won't ever get past a helper position. Most of these trades require every bit of 4 years to become proficient. Wouldn't that responsibility ultimately fall on the lap of some shop owner, who doesn't exactly have the time, patience, or $$$ to take someone at the block playing level and turn them into tradesman?
You should read more carefully as the points in your post have already been discussed. But here it is again:
Nobody has to start out using blocks, unless they lack measurement skills. This was an illustration that this group is sensitive to each individual's starting out point and how one location addressed this need. I thought that point was obvious.
They are not TRAINING people to BECOME helpers, the person STARTS as a helper, because as I previously stated, they may not have ANY SKILLS. A person with zero skills would be very lucky to start off as an entry level helper with an opportunity to learn and earn. A person with no job and no skills starting out at $25K inproves his life a great deal. This might seem a pittance to you but to a lot of people, it's a paycheck. They get raises as their skills imrove, just like any other job. Very few people get to start with a CEO's salary. If you want to be president of a company you have to put in the work and the time.
The person is learning skills he/she needs in classes he/she is taking at night. They are practicing and enhancing those skills on the job. This is not a six week quick start program. It is a carefully designed curriculum and provides hands-on training as well as textbook knowledge. The courses range from two to four years depending on the trade. When a person graduates from an electrical course they are now READY to sit for their electrician's license.
Some people are very lucky and have a family member who can teach them and hire them on. Some are not so fortunate. This is a good way for them to develop skills, make contacts and find a rewarding trade that can support them and their families throughout their lives.
I do not work for this company and get no benefit from posting here. I do believe in what they are doing as an alternative to college or trade school. This is not a criticism of either of these choices. Apprenticeship is an alternative program that requires less classroom time and MUCH lower tuitiion. (Some employers even pay tuition.)
If anyone has pursued apprenticeship training please post your experience.
You have no idea what you are talking about. I worked for a small consulting firm at that point in time, and not only did we have centralized servers and a dedicated database server with various permissions set for different user levels, it was all built around SQL on an enterprise level.
I really hope you are kidding. Most US households had desk tops before the 2000's, we had one in the early 1990's and were on the Internet in 1993. It was expensive and slow and forget the WWW thing, Netscape was about the only browser.
Disney has always been a cluster as far as technology--I was also working for them around that time--actually before that time. When they tried to outsource to ACS or IBM it made it worse.
Then they were WAY behind the times. Oracle was huge in the 1990's, as were several of their competitors. Just because you weren't using it didn't mean it wasn't there and many, many, many companies were as behind the times as the ones you were working for.
Not necessarily. I was going to college in the late '90s and many of the students had to use the computer labs for writing papers because they didn't have computers at home. I didn't have one, either. I know people who have only recently acquired their very first home computer -- yes, in 2012. And just go to the computer labs in many public libraries -- most of those people do not have a home computer.
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