Comment by 0max | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0max | Hacker News Reader

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What America needs are institutions similar to that of the apprenticeship programs of Western Europe. I came out of a one year job training program operating out of a non-profit with corporate partners (similar to the way it works in parts of the EU) that consists of college credit classes and industry experience. This lowers the barrier to entry for most young adults (like myself) to get into the job market and jump-start a career without going into debt.

After three years of graduating this program, I've now gone full circle working for a startup that supports the process of grant-making for foundations. That all being said, I recently put my income into fusion.net's millennial wage gap calculator to find that I come out into the top 6% of my generational cohort at a gross wage of 72k (at 23, I realize I'm an outlier). When I take into account that the majority of my friends around my are are still working service/retail jobs, I feel like something in our system needs to change before we experience a reckoning with a generation of kids with dead-end jobs.

I went to University back in 89-90 in Munich Germany while my dad was in the military. When the first Iraq war broke out he went and I ended up heading home. I did some night schools, but never got a degree. In 96 there was a program in Columbus, Ga, called ICAPP. It was sponsored by Synovus, Aflac and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Thousands tried out for it, and after much testing, interviewing, etc it came down to about 60 of us making it in. We got paid to go through a program that taught us Assembler, COBOL, IMS, DB2, and other mainframe development skills for 6 months. After that we were guaranteed a job at one of those companies. If you worked in Georgia for 4 years your loan was forgiven. I took a job in Atlanta at Total Systems, a company owned by Synovus. 20 years later I'm an application architect making $155k at a different company in Atlanta. I have no degree. When I finished the program it counted as college credit and I was 11 credits shy of a Bachelors, but I don't see what that will do these days. I have 20 years real world experience, and in case you're wondering, the latest project I'm leading is a NERD stack app (Node, Express, React, Database). I quit the mainframe job back in 99. I wish there were more programs like that.

The American story, reinforced regularly with research and articles like this one, has no category for professional or vocational training. The story is simply "how much university education do you have". If you go and train to be an electrician, you're the same as a high-school graduate.

So yeah, I agree, this is a big cultural problem the US faces.

It seems like skilled trades are kind of ignored in tech circles, largely because we rarely use them. (Calling the HVAC repairmen is the landlord's job.)

I agree. There were many kids in secondary school who would typically have the attitude of "when am I ever going to use this when I get a job" so they only half heartedly put any effort into school --more or less thinking they'd get jobs through friends, friends'' moms and dads, etc.

So, agreed, not everyone has the aptitude and need some vocational funnel. The problem with a place like the US (but not in Japan or China or to a lesser Germany) is that people will begin to ask why so many kids of this or that group are overrepresented in a vocational tract --given that disposition may be determined early on to be effective.

Still worth a try. And, to add, a system to help long-time workers transition into new jobs --through some kind of (un)employment insurance or mechanism with the same effect.

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