(2022-04-15) Craig Is It An Apprenticeship

Ryan Craig: Is It An Apprenticeship? With millions of unfilled good tech and tech-oriented jobs inaccessible due to both skill and experience gaps, there’s only one tool in the education/training/workforce arsenal with sufficient force to bring labor supply and demand back into balance. It’s not a college degree or bootcamp or training program. And it’s definitely not an unpaid internship. The only model that solves for skills and experience in a single, transfer-less, transition-less bound is apprenticeship.

The unique combination of simultaneously addressing skill and experience gaps (skill gap) creates remarkable outcomes. Completing an apprenticeship yields nearly $250,000 in additional lifetime income.

The resulting apprenticeship fever has produced an onslaught of apprenticeship lookalikes.

So with an alphabet soup of apprenticeship wannabes crowding the conversation, I ask this question somewhat more sincerely than the snarky host of Is It Cake? – Is it an apprenticeship?

you’re not an apprentice unless and until you’re hired as an employee by an actual employer.

Apprentices are employees hired by an employer and have much more in common with other employees than with students. In fact, there are only two differences between apprentices and other entry-level employees. First, apprentices receive on-the-job training (OJT) from experienced mentors. Second, there’s a prescribed program of Related Technical Instruction (RTI) for formal skill building.

like other entry-level employees, apprentices are expected to be somewhat productive in their role from early in their tenure

When they’re not in the classroom, it’s clear what role apprentices can play from the get-go in skilled trades like welding and electrician: assisting, holding tools. It’s equally unclear what a brand new apprentice tier I cybersecurity analyst can do, or an untrained apprentice Salesforce administrator. Digital jobs don’t lend themselves to apprentices looking over the shoulder of experienced workers 3-4 days per week.

we don’t see thousands of employers running around trying to figure out how to launch apprenticeship programs

The combination of apprenticeship enthusiasm + employer lacuna has created a vacuum into which have stepped well-meaning educational institutions, think tanks, nonprofits, and governments offering up apprenticeship lookalikes. But they’re not apprenticeships. And they may be complicating and confusing the issue.

Pre-apprenticeships and youth apprenticeships obscure the fundamental question of how to incentivize more employers to hire apprentices and by so doing create real apprenticeship programs. I have a few modest ideas, none of which involve colleges, universities, or think tanks.

1. At least cover the cost of the training

DOL registration allows employers to seek state approval, which then allows them to go on bended knee to state and local workforce boards to compete for scarce WIOA funding (less than 1/100 the level of federal funding for colleges and universities).

2. Make registration somewhat less nightmarish

Broken supply chains attracted Biden administration attention to the lack of truckers and the result was a reduction in registration time for new trucking apprenticeships from eight months to 48 days. But what about apprenticeships in every other sector?

3. Promote apprenticeships

If policymakers think apprenticeships are a good thing, they should allocate real dollars to market them. And while they’re at it, require every government agency to launch programs, acting like the major employers they are.

4. Foster a vibrant ecosystem of intermediaries

Where apprenticeships are common – Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and in the U.S. construction and industrial trades – an intermediary usually organizes and runs the program and acts as the employer of record before ultimate employers are asked to make hiring decisions. Intermediaries – most often an industry association or a union

apprenticeships are not bought. Apprenticeships are sold. And in the countries that are way ahead of the U.S. in expanding apprenticeships to the digital economy – the UK and Australia – it’s clear who’s doing the selling. In the UK, it’s about 1,000 apprenticeship service providers (ASPs) organizing, operating, and selling apprenticeships to employers

until now the critical role of apprenticeship intermediaries has escaped American policymakers. No longer. Last month, a new national nonprofit called Apprenticeships for America launched with the stated objective of focusing apprenticeship policy and funding on the seminal importance of intermediaries.

entrepreneurial nonprofits like Apprenti, CareerWise, and Year Up. They can be for-profit like many of the UK’s ASPs (including Multiverse, now in the U.S.), or Achieve’s Hire-Train-Deploy companies like Optimum Healthcare IT (healthcare IT), Cloud for Good (Salesforce), Metmox (cybersecurity), Ro Health (nurses, behavioral health), and SkillStorm (software development). Or they can be public. South Carolina has done more than any other state to expand apprenticeships. And much of the credit belongs to an intermediary established by the state: Apprenticeship Carolina.

Because apprenticeships are jobs with clear career trajectories, they’re the only pathway to socioeconomic mobility that truly level the playing field.

another $113M grant won’t move the needle. It’s not incremental change that we need. It’s systemic change.

the quickest path to systemic change is to establish incentives for current intermediaries to go further, faster, and – more important – meaningful incentives for potential high-impact intermediaries who don’t yet realize their power