These apprenticeship schemes do smack of wheel reinvention. From what I gather, they were all the rage up until the Blair regime anyway. From personal experience it would appear that a lot of apprenticeship and graduate schemes exist as a means of underpaying staff for the level of responsibility they are landed with. When I was job hunting after my MSc I found a lot of graduate schemes that were looking for newly qualified graduates with ‘two years of experience in the field, knowledge of Javascript, Python, SQL, C++, CAD, ideally six months + experience on site’, for a job that pays ~£20k is happens to be in London (they all are). Quite how you are meant to have gained those precious two years of experience is beyond me, because the true purpose of a graduate scheme should be to give the employee said experience in the first place. If you are already vastly qualified for such a role then you wouldn’t be applying! That job would be either a six month fixed term appointment or a sleazy rolling contract that means you don’t get any of the perks of being a real employee; you can be fired at any time, you don’t contribute towards a pension, you get limited annual leave and sick pay. Costa and Morrisons are probably rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of hiring and firing numpties on minimal wage positions at will without costly tribunals etc… It seems a lot of corporations allowed themselves to get very top heavy during the financial downturn, by firing the serfs first, then crow endlessly about their philanthropic work; re-employing a token number of youngsters on reduced wages with fixed term contracts.
Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. What makes a newspaper more or less great?
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