I get your annoyed at this, but this is how apprenticeships work. They’re a standard way for young people to enter the workforce direct from school without going to university. It is equivalent to going to college/university and being paid a stipend to do so: the trade-off (which is necessary, because the aim is to train rather than educate) is that the person has to work.
I’m not annoyed at a good program that offers education and training. I’m annoyed at your insistence on deliberately ignoring my original point that if a company profits from your labor then you should be compensated for your labor, despite my careful acknowledgment that “compensation” may not translate exclusively to “salary”.
I’m sorry for riling you up: I’m not deliberately ignoring you here. This is probably not right for OP, but no-one is getting shafted here. It’s not in any place: it’s specifically in ROI, and for what OP describes, a set of laws regulate and a a state body (SOLAS) runs the programs he’s talking about (of which their partners, yes, may be for profit companies). What they describe is standard practice, same as nursing degrees and teacher training conversion degrees (for two comparable examples). You place an untrained person in a workplace, normally whatever is available, where they get paid a wage, but that wage is (in UK and EU) much lower than standard minimum.
Hi @anluke, I’m based in London and didn’t do an apprenticeship myself but have recently added one to my team, having been approached by an apprenticeship company. Incidentally, I’m also 29!
Given that you’re doing the fCC curriculum I would advise against doing an apprenticeship. You have a stable job already and have access to adequate material to learn without spending money. You have the tools already, you just need to go through the curriculum and start applying to junior/entry-level positions when you’re ready. No need to lock yourself into a formal system on a lower salary for two years, you don’t need to expose yourself to financial stress.
An apprenticeship at a company like Microsoft would be fantastic but there’s nothing stopping you from applying as a fully paid junior once you master the material here! Whether you are an apprentice, junior or lead engineer, there is loads of learning to do in this industry - learning that can be done at any size company, on any salary, in any size team, on any type of project. Variety is the spice of life.
@ArielLeslie I appreciate that you are a mod but, with the greatest respect, your philosophical/political beliefs are not helping OP and detracting from the subject of discussion. As @DanCouper has explained, it is a system very much weighted in the apprentice’s favour in the UK/ROI. I am sure that there are many exploitative companies utilising the cheap labour but it’s certainly not the norm. Definitely, in the software industry, you’d have to run quite a slick operation to get ‘profit’ out of an untrained/early-stage apprentice, given the amount of senior engineer time you’d need to invest into them.
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I think it’s reasonable to object to companies not paying what the national entities in the region describe as ‘decent minimum standards of pay for workers’. Rent and food have to be funded somehow.
I will not say anything else on this subject, I promise. It isn’t a standard wage because it’s not the same as a standard job. The OP is being offered money to undertake a 2-year long vocational qualification. Because of the nature of them, apprenticeships reuse employment/work systems, laws and regulations, so an apprentice is an employee with a the rights that entails. But despite that, an apprenticeship should not be confused with normal employment. It is an alternative to college/university, that is the comparison. Funding bodies do not generally pay people undertaking vocational courses at college/university equivalent minimum wages unless there is a critical national shortfall in the skills the course qualifies a learner for. This is the same: unless the ROI government decides they desperately need to train tech workers (at which point they would provide companies with fat subsidies to take on apprentices and adjust the national pay bandings, or would offer grant payments directly to potential apprentices), payment for tech worker apprenticeships will remain at standard level. There isn’t any other practical way for this to work, because unlike other comparable vocational courses, there is not a single controlling authority that provides funding, apprentices are (on the whole) going directly into the private sector, so it is individual companies that pay to fund an apprentices training (in ROI, made up to minimum by the state body that oversees training). There is a floor as well: the pay cannot go below a certain level, and that works out around €7k/pa (which as an aside allows the payment to avoid most tax without having to have any special tax rules surrounding it, and it doesn’t have to be special-cased, it just falls under the same rules as normal income).
For example, nursing [in the UK, I can’t find funding rates for ROI] is also vocational, with similar working requirements for students, and the government provides £5k/pa as lump sum bursary grant, well below living wage. PGCE, the standard UK teaching course, provides up to £24k for 22 weeks minimum work, which is well above living wage, but that is only for targeted subjects that currently have critical shortfalls (STEM). If someone wants to be a primary school teacher (for example), they get a sum that is much less than standard living wage (£6k/pa). Both of those could work the same way as apprenticeships (and teaching will likely move more toward the same model in future, the government are pushing teaching apprenticeships atm), and instead of a lump sum, a student would get paid (the money is basically from the same originating source anyway, all state funded, so it’s just an accountancy problem). But unlike apprenticeships, students move between workplaces every few months, so it’s easier to just give them cash directly.
It probably isn’t right for OP, but “probably isn’t right” in the same sense that going to university for three years isn’t going to be right: it’s not practical. They aren’t being taken advantage of. Comparing apprentice pay with even normal minimum wages (let alone average developer wages) is comparing apples and oranges.
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Apprentices still need to eat and sleep somewhere. The comparison to nursing which has chronically bad treatment wrt compensation vs amount of work for individuals during training is not compelling.
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