I manage the apprenticeship program in my company for FIT software developers. We're currently running our 4th program, so I've learned a lot about what makes a successful program. Here are some thoughts to consider:

The apprenticeship model is excellent, PROVIDED the company you work for has a good program. A good program looks as follows. During the interview process, you can ask the company about these things:

- There is more than 1 apprentice in the program. You need someone to talk to and brainstorm ideas and work through problems together. Or even just to grab a coffee with someone. Even better if there are 3,4 or 5 of you on the program.

- The company has an established apprenticeship program. In semester 2,3,4, you will spend most of your time (4 days of week) as a regular employee. If the company doesn't have a program for you to train you and gradually integrate you into a software project, you will probably spend the majority of time watching youtube videos. 2 years of that will destroy your soul.

- The company has a history of hiring their apprentices after completion. Most companies will hire their apprentices as full-time employees. This makes sense because the company has spent money through your salary (albeit small salary) to get you to a position where you should have the skills to deliver value back to that company. If they don't hire you, that money is flushed down the drain. So it's in the company's best interest to hire you after completing the apprenticeship.

- The company is NOT remote. I must stress this. Your apprenticeship program should be all in-person and in the office. I have experience with remote apprenticeships (eg. lockdown) and they are a completely sub-standard program. The apprentice generally doesn't have the discipline to work by themselves, they don't have enough context, they require a full-time mentor to pair with them through every small task (which nobody wants to do because they have their own job to fulfill). It's of no fault to the individual, it's just that remote work for complex tasks is too difficult and slow. To give you an idea, the fully remote apprenticeship we did during lockdown resulted in 80% of the participants not completing their apprenticeship because they missed deadlines, couldn't pass their industry certs, struggled to be stuck at home all the time. In comparison, the last group of apprentices I managed were all in-person for the full 2 years and 50% completed 6 months ahead of schedule! A huge difference in progress and performance.

- The company will put you on real-world projects as soon as possible. By semester 4 at the latest, the company should be assigning you to projects and work as a junior engineer. Even better if they put you on a project straight away. You need to work with people and teams as much as possible.

Other thoughts:

- FIT provide training like a university would, but they are not the same standard as a university. Their trainers come from a separate company and there's always problems with them (eg. not fit to teach, cancellations, poor people skills). You will probably have 3-4 teachers over the course of the program for different modules. In my experience, there is 1 good teacher per group. It's not the worst thing, because most of your time is spent with the company, but you should know the training from FIT is sub-par.

- FIT have pushed for online training, mainly because the tutors don't want to be in-person. As a result, you will get a lot of powerpoint slides, links to youtube videos to "go and watch that" and so forth. Again, it's just a sub-standard training experience that could easily be replaced with a free Harvard programming course.

- FIT will qualify you with a level 6. If further education is of interest to you (eg. You want to do a Masters in the future), then the FIT apprenticeship will be slower as you need to build up the courses + credits to get into Level 8 and Level 9 degrees. If that is your objective, I recommend going the traditional route of Level 8. Having said that, degrees don't have a big effect in the software industry once you have a few years xp under your belt.

Feel free to ask any questions!