Apprentice

I seem to have watched more of the current series of The Apprentice than in past years. I was going to say I have watched more of it than is good for me, which is probably also true. I tell myself that it is nothing more than shallow and exploitative reality TV. But then, on the plus side, it has taught me most of what I know about business. Other than what I see on Dragons Den. Perhaps my university career would have been more successful had every academic subject been taught via the effective educational medium of reality TV.

It makes you wonder about apprenticeships in general, and how they don't seem as common as they were in the novels of Dickens, in which expectationless young orphans would be drafted for seven or fourteen or twenty-one years to learn the trade of a blacksmith or quantity surveyor or whatever. In my own profession, if it can be dignified by such a grandiose term, it takes at least a lifetime, if not two, to learn the basics, let alone to approach any serious level of proficiency. Hence we are a disappearing breed. I might actually be the last one.