In my last Coax outing, I advocated for bringing apprenticeships into tech. Today, I want to further underline the potential they offer—for individuals, for the products we build, and for the industry as a whole.
The tech industry doesn’t have a diversity problem, it has an inclusion problem. There’s an important difference here. Our track record of building, keeping, and empowering diverse teams is woeful. And that failure undermines the products we build and the services we provide.
This is not a pipeline problem.1 The pipeline is working and people are making their way through; it’s what’s on the other side that fails them. Despite the industry’s claims to openness, we are prone to bias and stereotyping, implicitly preferring those who enter via “legitimate” paths. This results in an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male industry.
But apprenticeships can offer a refreshing and rewarding alternative. They can nurture problem-solvers, foster culture change, and help us circumvent tired assumptions of what constitutes a “legitimate” path into our industry.
A quick definition
When I say apprenticeship, I simply mean taking on a novice in our field (engineering, design, product management, whatever) and allowing them to learn the discipline while practicing it. We pay them for that work and then retain them as valuable, long-term employees. The expectation of the latter is what differentiates an apprenticeship from an internship.
Semantics aside, apprenticeships involve a mutually beneficial mentor/trainee relationship. And the hope is that, eventually, these apprentices will grow into practitioners who then take on their own apprentices, and so on and so on.
This approach can facilitate the inclusion of underrepresented and minority voices from the ground up, paving the way for more innovative, empathetic products and work environments alike. Apprenticeships break down existing barriers to entry and offer a new path into the industry—an alternative to unnecessary experience, unfair expectations, and unrealistic requirements for today’s so-called “junior” positions.
Legitimate paths
We love to talk about how data-driven, empirical, and meritocratic tech is. But the belief that everyone has an equal chance to enter our field is flawed, perpetuated by those whose paths have largely been easy ones.2 We want to believe we’re where we are because we worked hard and deserve it; if others do the same, they’ll get here, too. But that’s a lie.
There are paths into the industry that are seen as the right ways, no matter how much we may profess otherwise:
- A traditional degree
- Coding bootcamps
- Self-taught freelancers
But each has a myriad of unwritten obstacles for designers and coders alike (including nepotism and the unwritten expectations swaths of different hiring managers).
We deify the self-taught, bootstrapped developer, but love a traditional Computer Science degree. Design jobs are similar in that a formal degree is often a requirement on job applications (that or “equivalent experience”). Traditional education, however, is a privilege not available to all. And even those who have access to such institutions are still not being hired.3
Coding bootcamps carry their own assumptions: access to a laptop, a chunk of cash to pay tuition, and transport, not to mention the time off to attend the bootcamp. Furthermore, because they’re often unregulated, there’s no guarantee that a bootcamp will teach the skills necessary for the job at the end. You may learn to code, but not necessarily learn to build or develop.4
Why should a candidate’s career path or background matter if they’re capable of doing what we ask of them?
Finally, self-education requires time and (usually) paid customer work to put in a freelance portfolio, but finding this work is often far more difficult than it seems. This path assumes that most clients are both willing to hire inexperienced designers from a minority group and to allow the resulting work to be displayed in their portfolio. But the reality is that the work ending up in the portfolios of these designers is often for small clients, friends, or family and often not truly representative of that designer’s skills.
Furthermore, beliefs about legitimacy also mean that we don’t conduct interviews in an inclusive manner. We aren’t colorblind, nor do we treat everyone the same. But that shouldn’t be the goal. The goal should be to understand our personal biases and the biases built into hiring practices that prevent us hiring and empowering minority candidates.5 Why should a candidate’s career path or background matter if they’re capable of doing what we ask of them?
Apprenticeships can help to mitigate all of this, in part, because they offer a new entry point into tech fields—one without prerequisites. The pathways into this industry are not infinite, despite claims to the contrary and the bullet points above. Apprenticeships recognize this and introduce a new option, one explicitly defined by openness and inclusion. Apprenticeships by nature have fewer prerequisites and fewer burdens on the underrepresented—a meaningful step in the right direction.
Starting at Junior
Speaking of entering the industry, how many entry-level jobs are there, really?
An initial look indicates that “junior” jobs are few and far between. And even when they do exist they usually aren’t entry-level at all. On popular job boards like AuthenticJobs, Smashing Magazine, Github, and Stackoverflow, it appears that only 1 in 150 postings is for a “junior” designer or developer. Worse, they include phrases like “2–3 years of experience delivering web pages, web UI/UX, and responsive” or “experience in web application development in a professional or internship setting” (emphasis added).
Many of these allegedly “junior” positions also require knowledge such as “JavaScript and transpiling, some knowledge of React and JSX, NodeJS, CSS, HTML, Git, Test-Driven Development.” That’s not even mentioning the “preferences” or “nice-to-haves” at the bottom of such postings! How can an entry-level position come with this much expectation?
Sure, the internship is often seen as an alternative to a junior position, or as a gateway to it. But even those, if paid, are almost always time-limited. And on the above job boards, internships posts still ask for things like “Proven experience with Node.js.”
Experience aside, the real problem with internships is that you never know how much a business will actually invest in an intern since that intern’s time at a firm is contractually limited. And for those few that do have the luxury of spending time searching for internships, doing side projects for them, and taking extra classes to qualify, a grab bag of time-limited work and a reference letter are rarely enough to get a foothold in the industry.
The more criteria we add, the more doors we unnecessarily close.
How can we say that tech can be picked up by anyone if we require such extensive experience of juniors? In many cases, we’re not really advertising “junior” positions and we shouldn’t be pretending to do so. If we don’t offer enough real entry-level positions and we’re also biased to both the people applying and the paths they’ve taken to get there, why are we surprised that our inclusion problem is so pronounced? The more criteria we add, the more doors we unnecessarily close.
Inclusion problems have to be addressed at their root: letting people truly start from the beginning without prerequisite is the only way we can address our own biases, foster a love for the craft, and drive structural, foundational change in our sector. Apprenticeships open the industry to everyone; the only requirement is their interest, not the expectation of client work. How we gauge that interest is still prone to bias and we must acknowledge that before we begin. Apprenticeships exist6 but the problem is that they’re far too rare. We should strive to remove the educational and experiential barriers, to let more diverse people in from the start, to expect passion without experience and then nurture the rest.
Encouraging problem-solvers
Since apprenticeships require no client experience, they challenge us to assess skills differently. We instead look to see if the person has a love for the craft and an empathetic drive to solve problems. Being experienced or having a full portfolio of client work doesn’t necessarily mean someone has these qualities. This is true for engineers, designers, or project managers.
For example, Apple’s Healthkit allows users to track everything from calories to molybdenum intake. However, when it was first released, it didn’t include menstruation tracking, effectively excluding up to 50% of the population. This failure of empathy perhaps shouldn’t be surprising; the company’s tech arm is 77% male and white.7 But it does lead us to ask: who should be solving these problems? As we aim to leverage tech for social good, asking and answering this question is increasingly important.8
Apprenticeships begin with empathy, then build the operational skills that are needed (and are far easier to teach): Photoshop/Sketch, UX methodologies, research techniques, etc. This approach focuses on empowerment; it teaches the required skills that are integral to each discipline while empowering those affected by the problems to do the solving.
In other words, apprenticeships focus on the problems first—it’s what do we need to solve rather than who is around to try to solve it. The more we can approach our work in this way, the more inclusive our industry will become.9 Rather than focusing on teaching men to empathize with menstruation tracking, we can give the decision-making to those who are actually affected. If they don’t have design or technology skills, apprenticeships can impart those while solving the problem.
The more we can remove the entry barriers, the more emphasis we can put on that which is hardest to teach: a deep, nuanced understanding of the issues we need to address. Apprenticeships are a step towards that: empathy as an experiential requirement, not a declarative buzzword.
Addressing culture where it matters
By removing the aforementioned barriers (bias, experience, operational skills) by way of apprenticeships, we can also improve the environments in which we do our work. Done right, apprenticeships can help lay the foundations for a whole new kind of workforce.
Right now, this industry has massive turnover; even when minority employees are hired, we struggle to retain them.10 We expect minorities to change the toxic culture, but don’t empower them to do so. In fact, we often penalize them.11 We don’t promote them into leadership roles12 often enough and we implicitly expect them to be better than advertised.13 These expectations, unsurprisingly, compromise self-care14 and result in shorter and shorter tenures for minority employees. Why encourage them to enter an environment which has historically been unfriendly to the underrepresented?
Apprenticeships are long-term commitments—an investment from both employer and apprentice. They are built on an agreement that the apprentice will stay with the same company after the apprenticeship is over. It involves teaching the apprentice the tools and skills to effect change—both technical and personal—while creating space for them to do so. Once their training is done, they are expected and empowered to contribute to the work as well as the culture that surrounds it.
You can’t change a culture without changing the people who define that culture.
Yes, this can be difficult for managers who aren’t used to such a personal way of working in an industry with such high turnover. But it needn’t be. We can install processes and structures which foster onboarding, teaching, and tracking the progress of an apprentice. The greater the investment in the apprenticeship structure, the greater the reward.
Apprenticeships can actually forge stronger personal relationships in an industry that often prides itself far too much on being impartial (while failing at doing so, often quite spectacularly15 ). They allow us to embody the empathy we so often extol.
You can’t change a culture without changing the people who define that culture. Apprenticeships can shift the culture of tech environments by welcoming different people through the door and placing power in the hands of those who would otherwise experience the fallout of toxic cultures. Apprentices don’t just learn how to code or how to manage a project, they learn how to collaborate with others, how to communicate in different ways, and they experience and alter at every turn the environments we claim to want to improve.
Let’s start actually solving the hard problems
Yes, tech has an inclusion problem. No, apprenticeships are not a silver-bullet; far from it. They’re difficult, just like any behaviour change is difficult.
Inclusion is by its very nature an issue of intersectionality, fragmented into separate issues for people of differing identities and viewpoints. Tech’s inclusion problem may manifest in one toxic culture, but cannot be solved by one initiative, especially if the people trying to solve this “diversity” problem always remain the same.
What apprenticeships can offer is a way of doing the very thing the industry seems to have trouble with—putting power into the hands of those affected by the problems. Rather than the established and privileged trying to understand and “help others,” we can strive to understand and enable and empower others to help us.
Apprenticeships emphasize a desire to solve problems and they value passion over arbitrary experience. They remove barriers to entry and offer long-term commitments. Between people, they foster long-term, open, and honest relationships that teach not just operational skills, but a love for our craft that can surmount tech’s high turnover and burnout rates. They drive structural change and make our industry orders of magnitude more inclusive, more diverse, and more empathetic.
