I have a friend who is in this program now to become an electrician. She has been working, for pay, on active construction sites for over a year, after completing introductory training/classroom work.
Accepting an apprentice means taking a preliminary dip in your own productivity, until such time as the apprentice can contribute a net gain to your unit. Someone has to take the brunt of that-- with electricians, for example, the introductory training helps them not to kill themselves.
Many subjects combine an academic component with an apprenticeship component. Physicians spend a lot of time in clinics as med students before they become full-fledged doctors. Teachers have to student-teach prior to becoming full-fledged teachers.
Cosmetology, hair styling, auto mechanics, the list goes on. All of these professions combine some academic study of principles with intense, prolonged hands-on training.
In the US if you look at the regulations for unpaid interns, the employing organization must provide experiences equivalent to the amount of learning the intern would recieve in a college course. There's some idea of treating unpaid interns as unskilled labor, but that as far as I know is against the intent of the "unpaid intern" concept and is, technically, illegal.
I have a friend who is in this program now to become an electrician. She has been working, for pay, on active construction sites for over a year, after completing introductory training/classroom work.
Accepting an apprentice means taking a preliminary dip in your own productivity, until such time as the apprentice can contribute a net gain to your unit. Someone has to take the brunt of that-- with electricians, for example, the introductory training helps them not to kill themselves.
Many subjects combine an academic component with an apprenticeship component. Physicians spend a lot of time in clinics as med students before they become full-fledged doctors. Teachers have to student-teach prior to becoming full-fledged teachers.
Cosmetology, hair styling, auto mechanics, the list goes on. All of these professions combine some academic study of principles with intense, prolonged hands-on training.
In the US if you look at the regulations for unpaid interns, the employing organization must provide experiences equivalent to the amount of learning the intern would recieve in a college course. There's some idea of treating unpaid interns as unskilled labor, but that as far as I know is against the intent of the "unpaid intern" concept and is, technically, illegal.