Routes in
Unpaid project work, internships and apprenticeships are three different doors into tech — with different speed, cost, commitment and proof. Here's how to tell which one fits where you actually are.
When you can't get hired the normal way, the advice splinters into three camps. One says do free project work to build a portfolio. One says get an internship. One says do a formal apprenticeship. Each camp tends to talk as if its route is the obvious answer. In reality they're different tools for different situations, and choosing well means understanding what each actually trades. Let's lay them side by side.
A formal apprenticeship — in Ireland, through recognised earn-as-you-learn programmes — is the most structured route. You're typically paid, you train on the job over an extended period, and you come out with a recognised qualification.
Strengths: it's paid, it's structured, and it ends in a formal credential plus real experience. Trade-offs: it's a big commitment, often a year or more; places are limited and competitive; and it's slow if you need to be working in months, not years. Best for: people early in their journey who want a thorough, supported, long-horizon entry and don't need speed.
An internship is a fixed-term role, usually paid, where you do real work inside a company. It's close to ideal proof — real codebase, real team, a company name on your CV, and often a reference.
Strengths: genuine commercial experience and a credible employer reference. Trade-offs: they're scarce and competitive, frequently aimed at current students or new grads (awkward for career-changers), and clustered around specific times of year. The cruel irony is that internships increasingly want some experience to land — the same catch-22 they're supposed to solve. Best for: people who can actually secure one, especially students and recent grads.
Doing real work for free — on a live product, for the proof rather than the pay — is the fastest and most flexible route. No application season, no multi-year commitment, no gatekeeper deciding you're worthy first.
Strengths: you can start now, it fits around a job search, and a well-designed version produces exactly what employers want — shipped work plus a reference. Trade-offs: quality varies enormously. Badly chosen, "free work" is exploitation or an asset-less time sink. The entire value depends on whether it's structured to leave you with a real shipped thing and a credible voucher. Best for: people who need momentum now and can find a structured version, not a random unpaid gig.
The deciding question. For any of the three, ask the same thing: at the end, what shipped work can I show, and who will vouch for me? Apprenticeships and internships answer it well but are slow and scarce. Unpaid project work answers it fastest — but only the structured kind, with a real product and a real mentor, actually delivers the answer.
And these aren't mutually exclusive. A common smart sequence is to do a short, structured piece of project work first — precisely to get the shipped work and reference that make you competitive for the scarce internship or apprenticeship afterwards. The fast route can be the thing that unlocks the slow one.
The Academy is the structured version of the third route, engineered to avoid that route's failure modes. You join a live Irish software project, ship a bounded piece under a mentor over about four weeks, and graduate with a public reference at a verifiable URL, co-signed by Raven Design and Built In Ireland. It's free, it starts without an application season or a gatekeeper, and it produces the two things all three routes are ultimately chasing: real shipped work and a credible voucher — in weeks rather than months or years. Think of it as the fast, low-commitment way to become the candidate internships and apprenticeships actually want.
There's no single best route in — apprenticeships, internships and unpaid project work each trade speed, cost and proof differently, and the right one depends on your timeline and what you can access. But they all converge on the same destination: shipped work plus a reference. If you need that destination quickly and the formal routes are slow or closed to you, a well-structured stint of real project work is the fastest path — and often the thing that opens the other doors.
Structured, mentored, free — four weeks on a live Irish product, ending with a public reference. Cohort 1 is forming now.
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