“These employers are really hard to find,” says Brittany Williams, partnerships manager at Edu-REACH – that stands for Rural Education Achievement for Community Hope – the nonprofit now working to find apprenticeships for students in and around Hamlin, including the high school Cook attended.
A case of demand exceeding supply
Apprenticeships combine paid on-the-job training with classroom time. Increasing their use has bipartisan support and has been a rare area of agreement among presidential candidates in recent elections.
They have also benefited from growing public skepticism about the need to go to college: Only one in four adults now say a four-year degree is extremely or very important for getting a good job, according to Pew Research Center. And almost two-thirds of young people aged 14 to 18 say their ideal education would involve learning skills on the job, such as through an apprenticeship, according to a survey by the ECMC Group.
But even as more Americans view apprenticeships as a route into the job market, employers have generally been slow to offer them.
Simply put, Williams says: “We have more learners than employers. »
There is currently 680,288 Americans in apprenticeshipaccording to the U.S. Department of Labor — up 89 percent since 2014, the first year for which the figure is available.
But that’s not even half of 1 percent of the U.S. workforce. For comparison, there are more than 18 million Americans attending college.
New nationwide research attributes this imbalance in part to employers’ reluctance to offer apprenticeships. After all, training people for work was a job that most of them previously relied on colleges and universities to do.
Apprenticeships will likely continue to be encouraged under President Donald Trump, who encouraged them in his first administration and of whom Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon is a strong advocate. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has promised to double the number of apprenticeship places.
But employers find it costly to set up, because apprentices must be paid and supervised.
“What’s holding back is the cost, both in terms of financial costs and the people who are going to hire the interns,” says Nicole Smith, chief economist at the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. “The way employers see it, they’re going to invest this money and train these people, but they have no guarantee of keeping them. There is no contract that says you have to stay. And who wants to train their competitors? Person.”
In fact, 94 percent of apprentices stay with their employer when they complete their programs, according to the Department of Labor. And for every dollar invested in an apprenticeship, an employer achieves an average return of $1.44discovered the Urban Institute.
“Apprentices, on the one hand, cost money because they don’t know everything yet and have to be supervised,” says Robert Lerman, former economics professor at American University and president of Apprenticeships for America . . “But on the other hand, they do things that you would have to pay someone else to do anyway. So if employers do things right, they can recoup a large portion of their investment relatively quickly.
Still, employer buy-in “is where we’re at right now,” Lerman says. “You have to step in and help an employer change the way they recruit and train workers, and that’s not easy. »
Even large companies, he adds, need help getting a program off the ground. “And if that’s the case for them, you can imagine the case for small businesses. They don’t even know what you’re talking about.
Orrian Willis works with several of these large companies as a Senior Workforce Development Specialist for the City of San Francisco. Even at big tech companies that have launched apprenticeship programs, he says, those efforts are modest.
“We’ve seen some of our partner companies post their apprenticeships on Indeed or LinkedIn and, after a few days, they have to delete them because they’ve received so many applications.”
All the recent publicity around apprenticeships means people “think they can jump in and go ahead and get one”, says Kathy Neary, head of strategy and business engagement at the Center of Workforce Innovations in Northwest Indiana.
This does not turn out to be true.
“We don’t have enough spots to meet the demand,” says Jennie Niles, president and CEO of CityWorks DC, a nonprofit organization that provides internships to high school students in Washington, DC. “The reason we don’t have the demand from employers is because it’s very complicated. Above all, employers need it to be easy for them.”
Calls to streamline the process
Among other things, employers are discouraged by bureaucracy. The federal government recognizes so-called registered apprenticeships, which require employers to meet quality standards and provide worker protections and must be approved by the Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency.
“It’s a ton of paperwork,” says Edu-REACH’s Williams.
The Ministry of Labor proposed regulatory updates aimed at strengthening worker protections, among other changes. Critics complained that it would only make things worse, and the proposal was quietly withdrawn last month.
The suggested rules filled hundreds of pages, threatening “overwhelm the system and introduce confusion and unintended consequences,” according to the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “Employers already find the existing apprenticeship system confusing and cumbersome. »
The organization argued that these additions would make apprenticeships even harder to sell to employers and would reduce rather than increase the number of apprenticeships available.
The first Trump administration created a new category of apprenticeships, called “industry-recognized,” managed by professional employer associations instead of requiring the existing level of government oversight. The Biden administration ended them, but some observers expect they will now be reintroduced.
Some are also calling for more support from government grants for apprenticeships. Many states already offer apprenticeship tax credits to employers, ranging from $1,000 per year per apprentice in South Carolina to $7,500 in Connecticut.
Apprenticeship advocates want more funding for intermediaries like Edu-REACH and CityWorks DC that connect potential apprentices with employers.
“We need to help run the business by creating these types of experiences,” says Betsy Revell, senior vice president of EmployIndy, the Indianapolis workforce board, which runs of this. “They need a lot of help to understand. They have never had to supervise a 16 or 17 year old before, or help them identify the courses that are usually part of apprenticeship programs.
Back in Hamlin, Texas, Joey Cook saw it himself as a young apprentice.
“I can see both sides,” he says. If apprenticeship was an excellent path for him, “for companies, they are taking a leap of faith towards children who have never had a legitimate job”.
Until more employers close this gap, says Krysti Specht, who co-directs Jobs for the Future’s learning center, “personally, it doesn’t make sense to me to create a groundswell for opportunities that don’t exist.”
