It's like carpenters or bricklayers. We hire student who are enrolled in a tradeschool, in our case they're studying "systemadministration/networking" and the job is part of the education. They are actual employees. They are organized by one of the unions, weirdly enough the metal-workers union, but they handle all apprentices, regardless of their field of work.
The apprentices are paid a fixed salary, they are allowed to work 37 hours a week, when not in school. We pay their salary while at school. We're allowed to have four per senior employee, to ensure that we can actually help them learn. In return we can more or less dictate what we teach them, so we can provide them with the education we need. They normally get the boring trivial tasks initially, but that's okay because it's new to them and they feel like they're help and doing actual work (which they are). As they progress we give them more and more responsibility, until they, in our case, get to handle customers on their own and do their own projects.
It's more or less the same deal with the student my wife has, they're just organized differently, because they're pharmacy workers.
On the surface it seems expensive, but it's a good way to hire people and in the end I believe apprentices actually make us more money than they cost.
We're not obligated to hire them afterwards, but normally most are interested in staying for at least a few years.
