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Replacing the Internship with the Apprenticeship
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Replacing the Internship with the Apprenticeship

99U, 2015

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Employers are willing to pay a tall premium for the most-skilled personnel. Meanwhile, unskilled workers stagnate with few opportunities to embark on fruitful careers. This trend exacerbates America’s yawning skills crisis. Designer Dan Mall has identified an age-old solution: apprenticeships. getAbstract recommends Mall’s persuasive, commonsense arguments to human resources professionals, recruiters and unskilled workers seeking vocations.

Summary

The American education system is flawed. Individuals learn at school and later apply that knowledge at work. On-the-job learning is a rare phenomenon. Employers want to recruit the most-skilled – and thus most-expensive – personnel, who move from job to job amassing experience. Due to employers’ preference for the cream of the talent pool, unskilled workers languish with few possibilities for advancement. Meanwhile, although the United States produces 40,000 computer science graduates annually, one million computer programming jobs will be vacant by 2020. Yet 7.9 million Americans are unemployed each year.

About the Speaker

Dan Mall is the founder and director of SuperFriendly, a design agency.