$151 017,80 : The Financial Gap Between A Classic IT Engineering Student Course And Mine
I obtained my high school diploma in 2011 and began to study economics in university. I never had experienced failure before, but here, I failed terribly 3 years in a row. Therefore, I challenged myself about my future. I always loved IT, but I was afraid to give it a try, because I am bad at maths (yeah, it’s pretty dumb). At this time, I was a student with a side job, not really well paid. My wife, kicked me to consider IT school, so I did. I was bored about universities after these failed years, I focused my researches on private schools. But as a broke student, I needed explored few options. First to show, making a student loan, I was not really convicted about this one because I am a bit stingy. The second one I found was more interesting. Work-and-study program.
What is it and how it works ?
The work-and-study program can be summarized as : you’re a part time student, and a part time employee. It’s not a internship. You’re really member of the company you work for, in a defined term contract.
Your company get tax cuts to prepare you, pay your school fees and provide you a salary (in France, depending of your age and degrees, from 27% of the minimum wage for the 18 years old or less to 100% for the 26 years old or more).
The salary is still the same when you’re at school.
Achieving this, you’ll practice in the tangible world what you learn in school.
Contracts are established from 1 year to 3 years depending on your course. In my experience, I made a 2-years contract, followed by 1 year contract, then 2 years contracts.
For the students
What are the benefits?
Ok, let’s put aside money, when you do this program, you’ll end your studies, with years of professional experience. When you see a job offer with 3 years experience in this domain, even if you barely completed school, you can get in !
You’ll create a professional network. It’s something crucially significant.
You’ll know better what you cherish to do, and what you don’t want.
You’ll appreciate what you work worth. When working with a team that give you feedback about you and what you’re doing, it’s a lot more representative than school marks.
Most of the time, you’ll end with a permanent contract with the company you’re doing the program, even before the end of your studies.
You’ll learn A LOT in contact of other professionals.
You’ll know how to be a real professional, understand how company works, and be really prepared for your work life
What are the limitations ?
Most of the time, you’ll sustain a comparable amount of school work than a classic student. In parallel, you would have responsibilities inside the company. It can be a bit exhausting. Forget about the school holidays. When these periods, you are full time in company. In France we have paid leave up to 25 days per year. Depending of the company, you can enjoy relatively more. But it’s not the 5 months of holidays we got in universities. Forget about being a casual student. Because you’re paid for attending school, every missing day of school must be justified the same way it would be in work days. I mean you need to receive sick leave justified by your doctor for example. If you suffer a deplorable mission, you’re pretty stuck in. I saw some friends of mine doing lower qualification stuff while working. Hence, they ended up studies without the promised practice. You can end up with less fundamental knowledge because you focused on practice. But after all knowledge is not only in schools and work, you need to discover things by yourselves
For the companies
What are the benefits?
Obviously, it’s low cost work force. When you get a student in it’s last school year and it have 4 years of professionnal experience, you reward it at most the minimum wage. Yeah, it’s not over here full time, but it’s remains cheap.
You can discover talents before they’re in the market. In the IT, where the demand of work force is higher than the work force offer, you can prevent painful research.
Students in work-and-study program are open and flexible minded, because they are learning, you’ll not have to deal with change. Most of the time they’re invested and likely to maintain a good productivity.
There are numbers of students searching for this type of contract and they’re not yet specialised.
What are the limitations?
As the student could be a bit stuck-in if things do not goes well, it’s pretty hard to end the student mission because they’re relatively protected juridically (in France).
You’ll have to dedicate a mentor for the student for all the contract duration. So obviously, this resource will deal with the school communications, some administrative tasks and the time to form the student.
You have the strong responsibility of a growing talent, don’t waste it’s potential.
How the time is managed ?
The time can be splitted in multiple ways, from complete weeks of company followed by weeks of school, to allotted days each week for each. I made my 5-years course in work-and-study program and tried both. I prefer the following schedule: 2 weeks of work for 1 week in school. Thus, you have enough time to get into the run at work and enough time to manage your projects.
As I said before, every school holiday are full time work in company. This is extremely beneficial because you can get involved into deep subjects during these times.
About finances
Ok let’s think about it.
The school I intended cost $6 038,82 per years. For the 5 years IT engineer course, it’s $30 194,10
I was 21 when I initiated my IT studies in work-and-study program. So I earned 73% of the minimum, it increased each year until 100% during my last study year. In the various company, as an employee, I received some spare money from annual bonuses, etc. For these 5 years, my average annual salary was $18 125,92. So a total of $90 629,60
For my particular case, I fathered two children during my studies, so I was tax free.
I was able to negotiate my first full time job salary with my 5 years of professional experience up to 26%.
In the meantime a classic student would have.
- Pay that $30 194,10
- Would have taken a loan or work in a completely different job domain
- Get an entry level salary
So if you make the comparison between a classic student and a work-and-study program student, the financial gap is:
30 194,10 + 90629,60 (work-and-study program acquired part) + 30 194.10 (classic student spent) = $151 017,80
I did not mentioned the extra money you can have with your work like company saving plan, company shares etc…
Conclusion
The benefits for both company and students are strong, while the limitations are more focused on the student’s capacity to be a rigourous and hard worker. From my point of view, it’s a clearly tremendous way to get your degrees. In my personal life, as a heartfelt IT nerd, I clearly learnt and grew. I focused this article on the France situation, but there is work-and-study program all around the world and in needs to be spread as much as possible. Companies, give student a chance to prove themselves. I am now a professional IT engineer with the needed knowledge to work with. Well, I am still bad at maths.
