Hello friends!
For those of you who don't know — I left my job at the end of 2023 and I'm now a free agent. I'm dedicating my time to consulting, research, and projects. I'll be using this newsletter every couple weeks to share what I've been up to.
Some of the sections probably won't be interesting to everyone so feel free to flick past. I'll always have some fun links at the end.
Small things I've done
Putting up my company website. There's nothing much there yet!
Shared a few thoughts on why frontend engineers tend to be skeptical of TDD. I suspect they’ll regret tagging me in posts when I have too much free time.
Written the first half of my CV. Writing up my time at Makers is going to take a bit of thought.
Tried out my coding video TDD analysis system on a six hour video that was kindly shared with me this week. Worked pretty well, and I used it as an opportunity to speed it up a bit.
Watching 7 Up with e, which is a series of documentaries following kids from the 60s. Quite a remarkable watch.
Where the apprenticeships roam
There are a lot of digital apprenticeships that people who are looking to enter the tech world can get into. These are great because you get paid to train, and sometimes the salary isn't awful either! You'd think that something so great would be easy to find — but they're not. The Gov.UK Find an Apprenticeship website is probably the best place, but no one is obligated to put all apprenticeships there. Plus the search is... not great.
I've been playing around with this and got so far as extracting the data from that service in spreadsheet form. Here are all the listings for the standards I thought seemed interesting/not too junk-y: Apprenticeships Job Postings. A few things I noticed:
Amazon have listed a vacancy for six DevOps apprenticeships! Pretty cool by itself but even more interesting, their training provider is listed as 'To be confirmed'... potentially a hot lead for someone. They're also listing six Cybersec L6 apprenticeships, but with... Gloucestershire college. Well I suppose that's fine. Google even lists their Ofsted report under the title "Nobel Prize", so they must be good.
There's a listing for a Data Analyst apprenticeship with a company brilliantly called Carpe Datum. Given the name you've probably got the image of the kind of company it is. But... they just do business intelligence dashboards for veterinary practices... someone clearly liked the name.
The Data Analyst Level 4 apprenticeships have an average salary of £20.2k, whereas the Data Scientist Level 6 apprenticeships, which are degree-level, have an average salary of £18.0k! That degree-level qualification is really delivering some value there, albeit negative.
There are only four data science apprenticeships there though so I wonder if the trend bears out. In the currently open job ads, L6 and L4 seem to be broadly comparable salary-wise, which is sort of interesting.
By the way, those apprenticeships with Amazon offer the highest salary of anything on offer, at £36.6k — no matter whether it is level 6 or level 4.
Games people play with Qualification Achievement Rates
I also took a look at the QAR stats this week, which are supposed to be the score by which you can compare all apprenticeship training providers. They're the product of two scores, how many learners complete the course (without e.g. leaving) and how many pass the exams. So if 100% complete but only 50% pass your QAR score is 50%, and vice versa. If 70% complete and 70% of those pass the exams, your QAR score is 70% x 70% = 49%.
This is all pretty sensible if you're a further education college where people take a course lasting a year and then some drop out and some fail. But let's say you're an apprenticeship provider, maybe you do day-release training once a week, or you front-load the training and you then only see them once a month or so. How do you optimise for retention and pass rate? You could just keep people on your books for as long as it takes for them to be able to pass (admittedly the government try to make this difficult to do, but not impossible). Then you just have to fight to retain them, and how do you do that? A bit trickier, but probably don't put too much pressure on them.
And this is roughly what we see reflected in the QAR data. For digital apprenticeships, of the 175 who had over 10 leavers in the 21-22 academic year, 160 had a pass rate of 90% or better. 133 had a pass rate of 100%(!) — that's over 75% of providers with a perfect pass rate.
The battle, then, is fought in retention. Only 20 of those 175 providers had retention scores above 90%. Of those, only two graduated more than 50 apprentices. One of those was The University of Exeter, getting them a QAR score of 95% for a cohort 60 learners — nice work.
The other? With an incredible retention score of 95% and a pass rate of 100% over a cohort of 230 learners — the Royal Air Force.
Well, if it works...1
Links
How different languages laugh online. I do like the kkkkkk style laugh.
Why do ships use port and starboard instead of left and right?
Did Elon Musk get rejected from legendary Berlin nightclub Bergain? Onlookers say yes. Elon says he just decided he didn't want to go in.
This list of linguistic example sentences kept e and I very amused the other night. I particularly enjoyed "Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"
Hope you’re all doing well! If you’ve got any life updates, do let me know. I’ve got lots of time to chat at the moment!
K
Not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, but the British Army has a retention rate of only 77% so we can't put this purely down to military discipline!
So lovely to hear your updates. ❣️ very witty as usual