One Month In – The Apprenticeship Report
As I wrote about sometime back, I took on an apprentice / intern this year. I wrote about the idea of the return of apprenticeships earlier this year as a part of my Education Is Horked series. This is a continuation of that series. Since we are about a month in ( maybe a little more ), I thought I would give an update.
My nephew has been working with me since the first or second week of July. It’s been a pretty topsy-turvy time for me personally as I have rolled out of Symantec and started my own company. It may or may not have been the ultimate time to take this on, not because I think it won’t work but primarily because I am not sure I am doing a great job at giving him what he should be getting.
Tyler’s original goal was to become a software engineer. He wanted to come down here, soak up the aura, and then launch on to the next thing. My goal was to throw as much at him as possible, with as much variation as I could provide, and hope that he latched on to something that he could get excited about.
I think it’s going OK so far. I am a bit stressed at the moment, and that is not helping. However, I think we have hit upon a few things in the last couple weeks that he is ( a ) really good at and ( b ) can make money at. We have agreed that the coding and software development stuff is going to be a longer term project, but that there are lots of ways to be involved in technology in the interim. He is learning Salesforce.com and actually has his first meeting with a client tomorrow to review some work there. He is also doing a great job working on some non-profit technology initiatives that a friend of mine and I started about nine months ago. I hope to have some additional work for him starting in the next week or two that I can actually pay him for.
What this exercise has taught me so far is a few things:
- I have very high expectations, and sometimes unrealistic ones. I forget that it took me years to learn all the things I know now, and I expect him to pick things up in a day. I started thinking back to all the things I have done so far, and realized that almost all of them gave me a piece of the puzzle. I need to do a better job of expecting achievable goals.
- It takes a lot more time than I thought to impart what I know, and I don’t think I do it very well. In my head, everything just makes sense. I also think a lot more than I say. As a result, I give an incomplete picture which leads to the wrong result. I don’t know why he can’t read my mind. I guess that’s a shortcoming of his.
- I really enjoy having someone else around. I have worked alone in my basement for almost three years. It’s fun to have someone to talk to every now and then.
