Posted by Dave Lorenzo - Business Coach

David Maister explored the extinction of Apprenticeship on his blog at DavidMaister.com recently. (Not TV style apprenticeship either – real hands-on work experience).  This was a good model.  It gave ambitious newbies the first-hand training and experience.   Why has it disappeared?  Here are the reasons, according to Maister:

“Companies did a number of things to abandon the apprenticeship model:

a) Lengthened the time and odds of making it to “partner-level” positions

b) Started hiring experienced people at advanced levels, thereby ‘blocking’ the path for those who were coming up the old way

c) Established permanent non-partner positions, also ‘blocking the path’ and signaling that not everyone was expected to have career advancement

d) Made partners lives so stressful and unattractive that many junior people increasingly question whether the benefits of partnership are worth the efforts that an apprenticeship would require

e) Placed greater pressure on partners to generate work and serve clients, thereby reducing the amount of partner time available for mentoring, coaching and development of juniors

f) Shifted responsibility for developing people away from senior professionals and reassigned it to trainers and HR departments (!)

g) Started holding back crucial feedback on whether or not people were going to ‘make it’: ostensibly this was to avoid making misleading promises for future promotions, but increasingly gave the impression that the firm wanted people to hang around “one more year” without the firm having to give any reciprocal undertaking

h) Stopped viewing their employees as future partners, and started treating them like REAL employees - resources to be consumed, not assets to be grown”

If David Maister is not on your daily reading list, he should be.

Filed under: Career Options
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