Improvements to the apprenticeship

[ZooeyMiller]

Having been through the first 4 weeks of the apprenticeship we have been asked to raise issues/make PRs to improve the apprenticeship repo/experience for future apprentices. Overall the original apprenticeship was a positive experience but I do think these things would improve it!

I don't know how much the things I would improve can really be made into a PR as most of the improvements are largely based on dwyl putting more time into mentoring/organising the apprenticeship, which isn't something I can really decide on.

Make it very clear what the apprenticeship entails.

From the application for the apprenticeship dwyl/hq#356 it seemed like we were going to be working on projects for 4 weeks, with a more experienced F&C graduate overseeing us, in actuality we worked on a few of the learn-... repos, and did a micro-project in the Elm front end example on hapi-socketio-redis-chat-example. The things we did were largely interesting to learn, but did feel a little disjointed. It didn't feel like it was clear to me why I was learning some of these things, what project would I be working on where I would put these learnings to use? It seemed like it would be the dwyl chat app, but then in the 4th week of the apprenticeship we pivoted to learning AWS (#10), which again, while useful did feel a little aimless, what was the goal of us learning AWS? Were we going to be deploying stuff on AWS in the immediate future?

I think before the apprentices send their applications a clear explanation of what the apprentices will be doing, why they will be doing it, how it will benefit dwyl, and how it will benefit the apprentices should be made clear.

Have a point person, and a back up

For totally understandable reasons, our point person (@nelsonic) was not available at some points during the apprenticeship, to give guidance and direction on what we should be working on. It would be good to have a back up point person who has an overview of the purpose of the apprenticeship, and the expectations of dwyl and the apprentices during the apprenticeship who apprentices could go to for direction when the main point person is unavailable. Ideally I think this would be someone who regularly works from Focus Hub or the F&C building.

Hopefully having a clear understanding of the purpose of the apprenticeship from both dwyl's perspective and the apprentices perspective would allow the apprentices to use their intuition a bit more and make it so that as much guidance wouldn't be quite as necessary.

Have daily standups

At the start of the apprenticeship we had a short in person chat with @nelsonic each morning, I found these very beneficial and would have liked if they could have continued through the apprenticeship. It's good to have validation/criticism about what you're doing, obviously in person isn't always a possibility but over hangouts would be great too. If there's a worry about the information being lost, one of the apprentices could always be tasked with taking note during the standups and they could be kept track of in issues for each day. It's just nice to set the expectations for the day and get everyone on the same page before getting started with working on stuff.

Make the possibility of continuation of the apprenticeship clear

The apprenticeship was listed as '4+ weeks', it took a while for us to find out how the apprenticeship would or could continue after the initial 4 weeks, to be candid, it's still slightly unclear. Is the continuation an extension of the apprenticeship? Is it transitioning to being a Junior Full Stack Dev for dwyl? Does the day rate increase from the initial £75, if so, to what? And what would the continued work be on?

Also, just what the criteria for the continuation would be and whether the potnetial for the continuation is based on performance during the start of the apprenticeship i.e. "we will let you know on week X if the apprenticeship will continue beyond the initial 4 weeks".

Just so that if the apprenticeship is not going to continue the apprentices can look for other work. A lot of us are pretty broke after finishing F&C so finding consistent paid work is really important!

Again, if this information is available before the potential apprentices apply it can set expectations and reduce confusion during the apprenticeship.

[nelsonic]

@ZooeyMiller the points you have raised are very useful.
could you please prepare a pull-request leaving out monetary figures (which are subject to change). Thanks!