>However I would rather not pay for the Apprentice's training myself.
No more than any other business model that has people learning on the job - I'm tempted to say less as the process is designed from top to bottom to deal with & compensate for people learning on the job.
The more junior people come with much lower cost so there is actually a lot of pressure on those "one or two really smart people" you mentioned (aka seniors) to drive effective utilisation of the rookies. This also means people start of being told "do this" monkey fashion...but then very quickly (<3 years) progress to a position where you're expected to demonstrate real world leadership over sizable teams in a client facing capacity. Its far from perfect, but its a system that pumps out an incredible amount of young people that went through a trial-by-fire education in real world business & walked away with solid skills.
>It is the IT Consultancy part that I have concerns with.
Not something I can specifically comment on to be honest I've seen fairly little of that (saw some cool real time cyber attack monitoring stuff though - which caught me by surprise). As I see it all the professions (Law, IT, Accounting etc) are always trying to eat each other's lunch so there will be uncomfortable moves into someone else's territory. (And be judged as unqualified by the incumbent)
>they have probably coalesced back together.
It'll depend on the firm in question. From personal experience - on the ground the divisions (Accounting vs advisory) are pretty cliquey in my experience even if they are supposedly "together" from a legal perspective. Kinda like a programmer would have to make a very real effort to get transferred to sales/finance/HR department in the average company...they're different tribes.
No more than any other business model that has people learning on the job - I'm tempted to say less as the process is designed from top to bottom to deal with & compensate for people learning on the job.
The more junior people come with much lower cost so there is actually a lot of pressure on those "one or two really smart people" you mentioned (aka seniors) to drive effective utilisation of the rookies. This also means people start of being told "do this" monkey fashion...but then very quickly (<3 years) progress to a position where you're expected to demonstrate real world leadership over sizable teams in a client facing capacity. Its far from perfect, but its a system that pumps out an incredible amount of young people that went through a trial-by-fire education in real world business & walked away with solid skills.
>It is the IT Consultancy part that I have concerns with.
Not something I can specifically comment on to be honest I've seen fairly little of that (saw some cool real time cyber attack monitoring stuff though - which caught me by surprise). As I see it all the professions (Law, IT, Accounting etc) are always trying to eat each other's lunch so there will be uncomfortable moves into someone else's territory. (And be judged as unqualified by the incumbent)
>they have probably coalesced back together.
It'll depend on the firm in question. From personal experience - on the ground the divisions (Accounting vs advisory) are pretty cliquey in my experience even if they are supposedly "together" from a legal perspective. Kinda like a programmer would have to make a very real effort to get transferred to sales/finance/HR department in the average company...they're different tribes.