The Practical Guide to Building an Apprenticeship
summary
Built a three-to-four month apprenticeship, recruits two apprentices, and hires both as full engineers who are productive six months later. Hiring uses anonymized candidate IDs, a standardized rubric scored 1–6 and a take-home code challenge hosted on GitHub; submissions are reviewed via PRs after a script scrubs commit author metadata. Onboarding includes scavenger-hunt tasks and foundational lessons, growth uses team rotations, pair programming, weekly one-on-ones, and explicit expectations; claim is lower recruiting/onboarding cost and greater diversity with measurable hires.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:13Why apprenticeships matter
- 4:00Planning the program
- 8:12Hiring process overview
- 13:16Coding challenge design
- 20:01Onboarding apprentices
- 22:12Growing apprentices
- 26:27Results and lessons learned
- 28:56Q&A
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