Five Years On: What Happened to the Apprentice, the Bootcamp Grad and the Computer Science Kid

In 2019, three people made three very different bets on how to get into software development. Amara signed up for a degree apprenticeship with a large insurer in Sheffield, earning while she studied at the local polytechnic-turned-university. Dev quit a job in logistics and remortgaged his sanity to fund a 16-week bootcamp in Manchester. Priya did the traditional thing: three years of computer science at a Russell Group university, a summer internship, and a graduate scheme in London.

Five years is long enough for the marketing to fall away and the reality to show itself. So we went back and asked all three the same questions: what did it cost, what did it pay, and what would you tell your 2019 self?

The Money Question Nobody Answers Honestly

Let's start with the numbers, because bootcamp providers and university prospectuses both get creative with them.

Amara, the apprentice, started on £19,500 — roughly what a full-time retail job paid in Sheffield at the time. Her friends on graduate schemes were earning more by 2021, and she noticed. But she finished with no student debt, four years of commercial experience, and a permanent role at the same firm, now on £52,000 as a mid-level engineer. Her employer paid her course fees. The maths works out brutally well if you can stomach the slow start.

Dev's bootcamp cost him £7,500 plus four months of lost income. His first role was a junior position at a fintech startup in Ancoats at £24,000 — a pay cut from logistics management. The leap from junior to proper mid-level took him three years, longer than he'd been promised. He's now on £48,000, and the bootcamp paid for itself around year three. But he's blunt about the intermediate period: "There were eight months where I genuinely thought I'd made a terrible mistake."

Priya graduated into the 2020 chaos, took a grad scheme at £38,000 in London, and now sits at £68,000. Highest earner of the three, but her London rent would make a Sheffield mortgage holder weep. On disposable income, the gap narrows considerably.

The Confidence Gap Is Real and It's Backwards

Here's the finding that surprised us most: the person with the strongest technical confidence in 2025 is the apprentice, and the person with the weakest is — at least initially — the bootcamp grad.

Amara spent four years shipping production code while she studied. By the time her cohort-mates were doing their first pull requests, she'd already broken a staging environment and lived to tell the tale. "Uni leavers joined us brilliant at theory and terrified of Git," she says. "I was the opposite. I had to go back and learn why the things I did every day actually worked."

Dev describes impostor syndrome as his default operating state for two years. Bootcamps teach you to build things; they can't teach you the surrounding craft — debugging production issues, reading other people's legacy code, arguing sensibly about architecture. He filled those gaps the hard way, in evenings, in front of a bemused partner.

Priya's confidence dip came later and differently: a nagging sense that her degree covered a curriculum last relevant around 2008. "Great at complexity theory. Never once opened a debugger at university."

Hiring Bias: The Uncomfortable Bit

All three report that the CV filter is still the enemy. Recruiters and hiring managers — particularly at larger UK corporates and consultancies — still screen for degrees, and bootcamp grads get binned at the keyword stage more often than anyone admits publicly. Dev estimates he applied for 140 roles to get his first one.

The apprenticeship route has the opposite problem: it's invisible. Amara's title didn't contain the word "developer" for two years, which confused every ATS she encountered.

But here's the shift worth noting: by 2023–24, all three had interviewers who cared far more about a GitHub history, a side project, and whether they could reason through an unfamiliar problem. The degree-as-gatekeeper is weakening, faster in startups than in banking, but weakening.

So Which Route Produces the Best Engineers?

Wrong question, says every one of them, unprompted. The routes produce different engineers on different timelines. The apprentice is productive fastest and confident earliest. The bootcamp grad who survives the first two years tends to be unusually resilient and pragmatic — nobody pays £7,500 and quits logistics on a whim without some grit. The CS grad has the deepest theoretical reserves, which pay dividends in niches like systems work and machine learning, and not at all in building CRUD apps for a housing association.

The honest answer is that route matters less than what happens in years two to four: whether you get good mentorship, whether you're exposed to production, and whether anyone bothers to review your code properly.

What We'd Tell the Class of 2025

If you're 18 and can tolerate a slow start, the apprenticeship is the best-kept secret in UK tech — the government's own marketing has done it no favours, but the economics are unbeatable. If you're a career-changer, a bootcamp can work, but budget for eighteen months of grinding, not sixteen weeks of glory, and pick one with genuine employer links rather than a slick advert. And if you're doing a CS degree, treat it as a foundation, not a finish line — the internship you take in second summer will matter more than your dissertation.

None of the three regrets their route. All three think the industry's obsession with comparing them is the real waste of time.