Accelerated Web Developers v Traditional Apprenticeships

Somewhere on my travels across the internet, I found an interesting news snippet. The snippet described
how Unisys were trying to bridge the skills shortage in IT development.

Essentially it boiled down to using off shore resource within an accelerated development programme. Budding developers were sent to a boot camp and would emerge after 3 months as experienced developers. Quite a revelation, and a nice bit of spin for the company in question.
My gut feeling is that no matter how intensive the training may be, 3 months really isn’t a long time. I’ve known site reskins take longer!

My views are probably quite staid, sure I’m not going to argue that some people could mature as developers in a very short space of time given enough time and resource. But enough to walk head long in to a new project and feel comfortable doing so?

This got me thinking alot more about my own personal journey as a web developer, over the past 8 years I’ve been involved with the web both as budding hobbyist and today as a lead developer on a high traffic site. To many I would probably describe my journey as that of a traditional apprenticeship progressing from HTML and progressing more towards backend development where I seem to have remained.

But what is a traditional apprenticeship for a web developer? Many of the people I’ve worked with over the years each have their own tale about how they ended up a career web developers some come from media related backgrounds like print, others from music and others through sheer misfortune.