Creating Coding Careers was fortunate to have 100% completion for a very long initial stretch, and the organization is still trending above 90% completion. We are still at 100% graduates placed, so everyone that finishes has no pay gap between when they started the journey and where they are today. That is amazing, but the 3 participants we’ve lost along the way were each devastating to me personally.
I have a hard time giving up on folks, but I have to continue to accept that as many barriers as we remove, and as many doors we open, it is still basic human nature to be skeptical and it takes amazing strength for folks to walk through the doors we open.
When designing the Creating Coding Careers apprenticeship program I focused on designing a one-year experience that would provide learners the basic tenants of apprenticeship: working under industry experts, earning a living wage, and maintaining a strong employer network for placements. I saw the gaps with Bootcamps and community college and we worked to fill in the missing pieces we saw with a true “student-centered” approach.
But, I’ve recently realized that I missed a key ingredient that can cause participants to slip and fall, some never make it back up on their feet. If you want high retention and conversion into permanent roles, don’t make the one big mistake we made.
Today tech apprenticeship requires detailed explanations to everyone about everything
My biggest failure is kind of meta, we haven’t done a great job educating people about apprenticeship. We don’t talk enough about what we do behind the scenes to make everything happen. We’ve been so preoccupied with making the program seamless and turnkey for participants and employers, that we don’t talk enough about the problems we are solving in real-time for them.
In the absence of repeated communication about career placement, how to gain the most from the experience, etc. Participants don’t know that no news is good news. It’s like we’ve built a bike with invisible training wheels and we expect kids to just jump on and feel comfortable. But, they need to see the training wheels.
We’ve unintentionally created an environment where natural fears of the unknown allow rumors and misunderstandings about the fundamental processes in an apprenticeship to creep in to the mind of participants. Apprenticeship for new collar careers is so rare in America that today tech apprenticeship requires detailed explanations to everyone about everything.
Here is another example that applicants ask me all the time:
“What’s the catch? Is there some contract I have to sign?”
Nope, there are no hidden penalties, no claw back, no money you owe us in fine print. We hire people with no coding experience, pay them to learn, and get the apprentices job offers from software companies. Apprentices (like all employees) are free to quit at any time, they are free to decline an offer and go do something else.
We and you won’t need any of those weird contracts because this just works (most of the time). If you are always acting in the best interest of your participants, you will retain them, and get them converted to permanent roles. If you don’t you will be out of business fast. And this is why it is so critical that you build successful programs. Employees have free agency and can move on if they feel like they aren’t getting the results expected.
I had to absorb this over communication principle the hard way by reading exit interviews and hearing things like “I thought it would take 2 years to get a permanent role, so I worked on finding a job on my own“. And it pains me because we didn’t do enough to help that participant understand how to make the most of the experience with us. They didn’t need to spend spare time searching for work… we connect everyone with a bunch of great opportunities with zero effort.
I would encourage you to avoid the mistake of under-communicating the patterns around apprenticeship. Why is it important to your organization? What problems are you solving?
Beyond designing a well-structured program and doing the work to ensure everyone will be able to be placed before the end of the apprenticeship, YOU MUST communicate to the participants on regular basis outcomes, what they are responsible for, as well as what you are doing behind the scenes.
I don’t mind folks focusing on what is past the horizon, it’s just that we have a lot of learning and experience we need them to absorb in a short period, so the stress of the job search is something best left up to our team. We only admit students when we have actual demand (signed contracts) from multiple employer partners that are ready to hire our graduates. I would recommend you design programs that can ensure 100% employment, then be transparent with the outcomes.
The industry standard placement rate for a coding Bootcamp is 68% of participants get jobs within 6 months of graduation. With an apprenticeship, folks have a paid job from day one, and most of our participants receive job offers at about 8-months into our 12-month program. For your program to be successful you must educate participants on how apprenticeship is different from a Bootcamp, college degree, or internship pathway. The lack of awareness needs to be filled with facts.
All the work we did to remove the stress from the students was just shifted to 2-3 months down the road from the honeymoon phase. Until recently 😉
Pro-Tip: If you want to ensure retention is high, a few things to consider as critical components are:
high-quality instructors with industry experience
teach relevant and industry-driven skills
generate multiple mentorship opportunities
pay a living wage and offer medical benefits
practice high transparency and constant communication about the program, expectations, and help in job placement
regular check-ins with graduates to track their progress and successes (and failures so we can learn from them!)
Last month I started having regular “transparency” sessions during our daily all-hands meeting to explain more of the mechanics of the Creating Coding Careers tech apprenticeship program to participants. The feedback we received was very positive, so we are now working on ways to bake this information into the onboarding process as well as regular team updates.
I hope by sharing the unexpected challenges we’ve faced you can leverage our discoveries to make your program better.
If you are looking to get involved with an apprenticeship program, whether it’s to design something of your own, or learn more about the way we do it at Creating Coding Careers please reach out to me. I am happy to share all my secret recipes to ensure that this pattern flourishes here in the US.
And if you found this insightful please share it with someone that can use apprenticeships to make an impact in their community.