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This is a bit of a rambler (because it's all rather close to my heart), and it's broken up into sections that can be (mostly) read standalone. But there is an overarching point to all this musing, if you'll afford me the patience.
I talk a big game about "autodidacticism", "critical thinking", "experiential learning" and co, but these things have sadly become little more than buzzwords in this day and age. They're actually very close to my heart though, and I have real opinions on how to achieve/utilise them.
Context
I was a very STEMmy kid. Math, science, computing, or anything that I could pull apart the logic behind just resonated with me. I was also quite creative though, and would often come up with bizarre stories, characters and concepts. I had more than a dozen notebooks full of stray thoughts and ideas — everything from the algorithm by which level scaling would work in an RPG, to character profiles down to their age, birthplace, strengths, and quirks. I wanted to be a game developer from as early as ~6 years old. I just thought they were such an impressive amalgamation of so many different disciplines — we had created entire, interactive worlds with computers. How could I not find that fascinating?
But I remember my teachers stating — prophesying, almost — that I would go on to do a STEM degree, get a Bachelor's, get a Master's, maybe even a PhD. That was just perceived as "the path", for me.
My folks took a pragmatic stance around university. "Go if you think it'll help you, but don't go for the sake of it". I'm not sure they said that so bluntly when I was a kid, but the essence must have been put across either way. Pair that with my confusion at the fact that my teachers didn't want me to pursue my dream — game development wasn't a "real" career, apparently — and very early on in my life I developed a real skepticism towards higher education.
By college, I was pretty convinced that university wasn't for me. I did well on my GCSEs, but I just wanted to kick the academia aside and start developing games. So I took a game dev course. I loved it. It got me a foot in the door with 3D modelling, graphic design, sound design, animation, UX/UI — hell, even proper storyboarding and voice acting. And of course, programming. I'd dabbled in it since I was about 11, but this was where it finally "clicked". I remember lying on the carpet with a beer (yes, that is legal here), and explaining to my friends how a cupboard could be represented in OOP. Riveting, I know.
Anyway, my college of course took the same stance as I'd grown accustomed to. "But you got A*s! You simply must apply to university!" I claimed I'd like to go for one of those fancy "degree apprenticeships", and if not that, just go straight into a junior dev role somewhere. I was practically laughed out of the room — and in today's UK, I'd honestly say understandably so — but then I was all but forced to apply to university anyway. However...
(As a side point, I actually quite liked my college, so please interpret this more as a criticism of the British education system as a whole than a reflection of the specific college I attended.)
Getting a Job
My final interview. By which I mean, my last shot at a role, before the hiring window for that academic year closed, and I'd have to fall back to trying to:
- Get a junior dev role straight from college (difficulty: extreme — I'd already not had much luck)
- Try to start up my own business (also not easy)
- ...Or suck it up and go to university (not happening).
A week later, I got a phone call.
I didn't get the job.
"Too interested in game development".
I'd used some self-styled variation of Agile in college to manage our final game dev project, so I talked about that for a bit. I demonstrated some C# code for a mini physics engine I'd built, in the hopes of proving how my logic could be applied to software engineering. It was all I really had to talk about.
I didn't have a variety of A-Levels like a lot of my peers.
I couldn't project the versatility of someone who had to switch between three different fields of study.
I just had one area that I'd recklessly thrown the full force of my willpower at for the past two years. An area that I'd long been made very aware by my peers was a bit "childish".
Two weeks later, I got another phone call.
Same company. They must have changed their mind, or lost one of their more desirable candidates. They wanted to hire me.
I'll be the first to admit, I have too much pride. Honestly, the fact that I can publicly admit any of this is the best evidence I have that I'm better than I was.
I genuinely considered turning it down.
You can't be someone's backup plan, Adam. You'll always be known as Mr. Last-Place.
But I took the offer, because at least my logic seemed to trump my ego.
I couldn't shake it, though. The idea that I was in last place.
I saw every one of my peers that were hired alongside me as better than I was. Long did I tell myself that if they had to scrap one person right now, the logical and obvious choice would be me. For someone who'd grown accustomed to being the "try-hard over-achiever" in the room, it was... well, here's an interesting adjective. Invigorating.
You see, there's something quite powerful in the fear and self-loathing that grows from being the lowest on the ladder, and the closest to the flames below. I'm overdramatising this, I know. But it's a real problem for an 18-year-old with a fragile ego and less pay slips than fingers. You get addicted to such a feeling.
But no, this rather purple monologue is not just some self-indulgent recollection of how my grit (workaholism) and discipline (self-inflicted fear) propelled me forward in my career.
Nah.
Instead, I'll tell you about a turning point. One that I didn't realise meant anything at the time. But five years on, I can say firmly that even such a mundane decision upheaved my trajectory entirely.
Learning Differently
Early in my apprenticeship, my cohort was asked to watch a handful of video lectures over a couple days to get some theoretical understanding of a few programming languages and paradigms. My worst nightmare.
I couldn't focus for the life of me. I find it incredibly difficult to "watch and learn" — my brain switches off. I take no shame in it (nowadays, anyway). So I decided to scrap the videos, and just started building something. I think I made some silly animated rainbow background in React, and anywhere you clicked would add another origin from which the colours would spiral out from. Somehow I think that got me using hooks 😆. It didn't really matter what I made, but crucially, I scrapped the evidence immediately after.
Then my manager looked at everyone's progress. Everyone else was finished, and I'd watched about 40% of the videos. Yes, Mr. "Last-Place", as he kept calling himself, decided to further sabotage himself by (implicitly) saying "nah, screw your videos, I'm teaching myself", and slatting any evidence of that in the bin.
Anyway, I ended up being able to teach, guide and assist the folks around me as soon as we hit the ground running with a tangible project.
What a shock! Me? How?
But from that point on, I was a little more confident in my initiative (rebellion). And it's when I came upon one of my core philosophies; something that, behind the scenes, influenced my attitude from thereon:
Nobody knows your mind better than it knows itself. You are therefore your own best teacher.
So yeah, that's my revelation. My ground-breaking discovery. Just teach yourself by doing the thing. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
(Sarcasm aside, I do have some genuine strategies to self-teaching, some of which may be genuinely a bit novel. So I'm sticking a TODO here so I remember to write about it in future 😝)
The Power of a Degree Apprenticeship
So what's your point, Adam? I've been reading for over five minutes.
Well, after a few weeks of training, I was on real work.
After little more than a year, I was taking on some degree of leadership.
After two years, at 20 years old, I was engineering projects of significance and ubiquity that most never get to touch in their lifetimes.
By the end of my scheme, at 22, I was picking up architecture on said projects, with 89.5% final mark on a software engineering degree, 7 AWS certifications, £0 in debt, >£50K saved.
I don't intend for that to sound hubristic. The point I'm making is that basically, if I didn't get that role (as I did, by the skin of my teeth), I wouldn't have been in that position. Folks my age had amassed potentially 25 years of debt and were starting their grad schemes just as I was promoted to senior engineer.
Obviously, it requires serious work. Degree apprenticeships are infamous for that. I was fortunate enough to largely work from home, which frees you up a lot of time that would otherwise be spent commuting, to crack on with coursework and such. And as much as my childish self-loathing ripped me up a bit, I must admit, it made it easier to knuckle down. But I don't for a minute take for granted the sheer good fortune it took to land me in that position. It changed who I am.
Cynicism
I think it's only fair to preface this section by saying: I'm biased. That's why I would honestly welcome anyone to disagree with or challenge me.
As in the Context section, I went into university with a cynical attitude. Even if I didn't, I never attended in the same way that most people do. I don't look back with fondness, nostalgia, a sense of achievement, or even particularly any sense of familiarity. "Alma mater" is a foreign term to me. That's not necessarily a fault of the university; it's a matter of circumstance.
But the truth is, my career was always lightyears ahead of my education. I remember being "taught" about REST APIs during my third year of university. Frankly, I felt insulted. If I hadn't come to understand that in the first few months of my career as a junior software developer, I'd be (or should have been) out on my ass. I gave it a chance at first, and eventually stopped paying attention in lectures. Instead, I'd unsheathe my laptop to research, say, how Docker worked. Or regex syntax.
I started to shirk on my attendance — to be honest, the only reason I pulled my socks up was because I realised my "coach", who was a genuinely lovely chap, was probably getting it in the neck for my truancy. I didn't think that was fair on him.
I vividly remember that the most valuable thing I did was a module on AI. It was an elective that I'd deliberately picked because it was a field I'd never touched before — so it genuinely was a "ground-up" learning experience. The first thing that lecturer said to us was, "I don't care whether you attend my lessons or not. Last year, I had a guy show up to the first lecture and then never again. He got the highest mark." Ironically, such a display of honesty compelled me to ensure I had 100% attendance in his lectures. Yeah, I know he totally reverse-psyched me there 😆
Generally, I would do the work, I would do it on time, and I would do it to the best of my ability. But I never truly engaged with it all.
I didn't even attend my graduation. My logic was that to attend it would be to invalidate my own ideology — I can't sit there and claim the redundancy and over-traditionalism of a system and then celebrate it with a very traditional ceremony. I'd actually forgotten about the day entirely, until my friend WhatsApp'd me a photo of my name against the "Best Overall Mark" award (something that, after all my grumbling and fist-shaking about teaching yourself, I was admittedly quite proud to say I achieved).
My point is, I had a side-by-side comparison of a career, and of university, in action. True, it's not a perfectly fair assessment; 20% of my contracted time was at university, while the remaining 80% was at work. But when your neck is on the line for extremely important infrastructure being up and working and healthy, quite frankly, anything that a lecture hall could throw at you feels utterly trivial. Yes, that's an experience limited to degree apprenticeships, but if that's the case, does it not kind of say that there are more efficient ways to learn than what we try to push everyone towards?
The Case for Apprenticeships
I really do think there's a time and a place for university education. Hell, I think some amount of theoretical education is beneficial in most fields.
But I think, shy of very abstract disciplines like Maths or Physics (and even then, I would ask you to consider whether pure theory is going to help you to get the career you want), there's rarely a good justification for going, "yeah, nah, you know what? Instead of doing the thing, I'd rather learn about the thing for 3-4 years for the low, low cost of a few hundred out of my income every month for the next quarter-century."
Honestly, I think university courses for practical fields like acting or culinary arts are, frankly, naught but greedy, disingenuous capitalisation upon the lack of awareness from your typical 18-year-old (the mode applicant) on what it actually takes to get a career in their field of passion.
It feels like the default route is university, whereas really, it should be the fallback.
I understand why the UK clings to its universities. Other than the US, we have the most highly-regarded institutions in the world. But that's precisely what we're doing — clinging.
We can have successful universities without ramming them down everyone's throat.
We can attract international talent that see value in our institutions without telling 6-year-olds that their destiny is to prefix their name with "Doctor".
Let's look at some countries that have chosen to focus on apprenticeships:
"More than two-thirds of young people in Switzerland chose a VET (Vocational Education and Training; similar in nature to the UK's degree apprenticeships) pathway after compulsory education (Source)." Compare that to 2.2% in the UK (Source). 2.2%. Switzerland has a productivity rate of ~$100/hour of work. The UK, comparatively, has a productivity rate of ~$68/hour of work (Source). That's just one example. Germany and the Netherlands both make much better use of VET than we do, with ~$82.50 and ~$84.80/hour of work, respectively.
Yeah, I know; correlation, not necessarily causation. But there's a very evident trend, at least. If you needed more convincing, I'd point again to Switzerland — 60% of firms recouped their costs (Source — though yes, to be totally transparent, the same article does also cite that 93% of German firms, which also (if somewhat less successfully) are big on VET, incurred net costs). The NEET rate in Switzerland is also lower — 6%, vs 12% in the UK (Source).
I wouldn't even claim that this shift wouldn't require some level of investment from the UK at large. But by god, it'll bolster our productivity in the long run. Remember — the mind is more efficient when it's young. I have met many a person under 25 (many of which are much cleverer than myself, by the way) who would put the average professional twice their age and quadruple their experience to shame. Purely because of apprenticeships.
Time to wrap my yapping up.
I understand that I can't say this and expect folks to go, "yeah, sure, I'll scrap a degree, which the government, nigh every employer and their dog seem to love, in favour of an apprenticeship that's been propagandised as the route for losers." Change isn't that simple. But please, if you're in a position to do so, seriously think about it. It's a win-win, then a win again, and a fourth win for sh*ts and giggles because hey, we're giving them out for free!
...Believe me when I say that this is the most obvious game-changer that we keep on missing the mark with.