The Main Thing: How would an apprenticeship work?

In last week’s newsletter we asked whether you thought apprenticeships were a good way to learn product development skills and 50% agreed, with some really great comments as well.

This week I want to dig into how that would work. For context, during a four year electrician apprenticeship, the apprentice is paid close to a minimal wage and they are expected to spend 20% of their time in classroom training.

Would this work in product development? I see a few different examples of how this could work:

1. We replace the college education and jump straight into the apprenticeship. Would people, and companies, suffer from the lack of depth in the knowledge of the staff? There has been a rise in boot camps designed to take people from 0 knowledge to productive in a few months. They were popular during the pandemic when demand for such roles was high but they have suffered in the downturn.

2. We do a shorter apprenticeship, maybe 2 years, after the college education. 2 years is probably sufficient to get a good understanding of different product development approaches, particularly with a well-designed apprenticeship. But how would pay work? Would people be willing to accept low wages while they are in the apprenticeship? Seeing their peers starting off on higher wages would be a tough pill to swallow. Equally, would companies be willing to pay high wages when someone is not contributing as much as a full-time employee?

3. We mix the two. We shrink the college education to 2 years and then do a 2 year apprenticeship. Is this the best of both worlds? Or are we sacrificing too much depth in the knowledge?

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

How Burnout Became Normal — and How to Push Back Against It by Kandi Wiens
40% of Gen Z workers believe burnout is part of success, hustle culture tells people to never stop and “trial-by-fire” assignments are common. What can we do about it?

The Purpose Experiment: From Dream to Crushing Reality by Tine Bieber
An example in pushing the boundary of organisational structures and the ways that it can go wrong.

Product Direction

How to Learn and Practice Product Management in a Feature Factory by John Cutler
Instrument what you ship, interact with customers, learn how the business makes money, collaborate with design and dev, set goals and find advocates.

Meaningful Metrics: How Data Sharpened The Focus of Product Teams by Erin Gustafson
The Data Science team at Duolingo developed a growth framework that helped to grow DAUs by 4x since 2019.

Continuous Discovery

No, AI User Research Is Not “Better Than Nothing” - It’s Much Worse by Pavel Samsonov
Synthetic insights are not research. They are the fastest path to destroy the margins on your product.

Continuous Interviewing With Kristian Collin Berge by Afonso Franco
Tips & insights to foster a habit of continuous interviewing and why it's so important

Continuous Design

How to Build Your Design System by Chad Bergman
Learn the basics of creating a system tailored to your unique goals and challenges, whether building from scratch or starting with existing pieces.

Don't Put Crap In The Design System by Brad Frost
Crap is rushed work, low-quality work, shortcuts, experiments, first drafts, one-offs, and other unvetted/untested/unverified work.

Continuous Delivery

Is The “AI Developer” a Threat To Jobs – Or A Marketing Stunt? by Gergely Orosz
From “the first AI software engineer,” to a “superhuman software engineer.” As intimidating as these sound: what if it’s more marketing than reality?

What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation, And What Does It Do For Generative AI? by Nicole Choi
Here’s how retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, uses a variety of data sources to keep AI models fresh with up-to-date information.

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New Video Released This Week

Mariné Palamutyan moderated this roundtable with Beata Wilczek and Emerson Taymor. They discussed key strategies for business growth and learning that will help your organisation. 👇👇

Job of the Week

Senior Product Designer
🏬 Miro
📌 Amsterdam, Netherlands

About Miro
Miro is a visual collaboration tool that offers an infinite canvas for remote teams to innovate and brainstorm. It supports over 60 million users globally, including major corporations, and is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Amsterdam.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: Do you think we should have apprenticeships in product development?

This poll has been our most popular to date so it is clearly something people are thinking about.

Some of the key highlights from the comments:

"In an increasingly remote world, workers and companies have to be deliberate in developing skills and apprenticeships to satisfy that need"

“Many people have no senior person to learn from and are left to their ways which result in less quality ”

Many of the comments highlighted that it depends on the quality of the apprenticeship though. They would need to be designed really well and more hands-on than traditional internships.

With 50% in favour, I think there is an appetite out there - we just need to figure out how to do it.