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It's Saturday, July 31st, 2010, 8:16 pm
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The New Apprenticeship - Learning by Doing - When you mix today's world of ever increasing technology and Madison's low unemployment rate, you create a formula that is potentially deadly for small high-tech companies. Since there are fewer and fewer well-trained employees available, most high-tech companies are recruiting from other cities, offering high salaries and enormous benefit packages to those willing to relocate. So what does a smaller company do to hire and retain employees in the midst of such fierce competition? At the Industry Connection, Inc., (www.industryconnection.com) a Web design and New Media firm in Madison, we've created a way to train our own employees with an apprenticeship program specifically geared towards women interested in changing careers. The apprenticeship program is a time honored training system, where a skilled worker passes on knowledge of a trade to an apprentice. Most often, apprenticeships are available in the Construction Trades (for those choosing to become plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc.), Industrial Occupations (i.e.. machinists, welders, tool & die makers) and Service Occupations (such as chefs, barbers, mechanics). Today, high-tech apprenticeship programs can greatly benefit both the apprentice and the employer. Since forming in 1993, the Industry Connection has been committed to creating an atmosphere of growth and empowerment for its employees, and the apprenticeship program allows employees to experience the fulfillment available from teaching and empowering others. We believe that you never really learn something until you can teach it to someone else. When hiring new employees, we discovered that it is infinitely easier to take a creative person and teach them advanced computer skills, from HTML to relational databases, than it is to take a computer-literate person and teach them to be creative. Therefore, what we look for in our interns or apprentices is a solid creativity, a willingness to learn both on their own and in guided sessions, either a strong sense of self-worth or a desire to improve their self esteem, and most importantly, the ability to envision a completed project and work backwards. We prefer that our apprentices have little or no computer experience, and we most often will decline someone who has already learned HTML somewhere else, as it is twice as hard to "un-teach" bad HTML habits than it is to teach someone from the ground up. Our apprentices must work on their own time, learning at their own pace, beginning by creating a personal homepage of their own and gradually moving into assisting with pieces of professional projects. The apprenticeship can take as little as two months and as long as a year, depending on the number of hours the apprentice is willing or able to work. Through the apprenticeship, they learn basic HTML, graphic design, Javascript, animation, relational databases, and much more. They learn to use professional software packages such as Photoshop, Microsoft Access, Paradox, SQL Server, CorelDraw, and Pagemaker But most importantly, they learn to believe in themselves and their ability to learn, teach and create.
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