Hello Dave,
I wanted to thank you for the white paper you gave me when I reached out while starting our apprenticeship program at my company and share the results of the program with you. We took on 3 apprentices for our program and the program went really well and we've hired all 3 as full time developers.
We got to train 3 people in our processes and business, they all contributed to projects during the program and at the end we had 3 new hires that were ready to go day one, who we knew could perform since they had already been contributing and had been trained in everything we wanted them to know. We've had a hard time hiring people in the past and this just went so smoothly -- even the time investment wasn't as bad as I budgeted for, really early in the program they were able to contribute small units of work to the point that my time investment was recouped by the work they were contributing back.
The way we modeled the program was we split up all of the skills and knowledge we would want our "perfect" junior developer to have after training into 3 interviews with increasing difficulty. The checkpoints were the 3 interviews which also had problem sets and a project attached to them. The first part everyone did the same work/projects and then we started splitting them out into the teams they would be on and focused on the technology/projects they would be working with. That was mostly just a specialization though, I still expected people to be cross functional.
I think the most valuable "thread" of lectures was what I called "comparative anatomy" -- that's where I spent a lot of time comparing the anatomy of different languages, platforms, servers, etc. A lot of the focus was on how to quickly work in something new based on what you already knew -- this included problem set problems in new frameworks/languages, translating code between environments, etc.
This is definitely a passion for me, refining our own business processes through training/teaching new developers helped improve my department and got me 3 well vetted hires. You seem to be one of the only other people in our area pushing for apprenticeships, if you're going to be publishing another book or more resources I'd love to be involved - I really do think this is the future of hiring for junior level developers.
If you happen to know any companies looking to grow their technology department interested in this type of program I'd love to talk to them, running this type of program in a growing company is a career I would really enjoy.
-- Kyle