Make apprenticeships work again

OPINION:

President Trump is right: America must prioritize apprenticeships. He is right to aim high by demanding a plan to “surpass 1 million new active apprentices.” More apprenticeships can solve a lot of America’s problems.

The hard truth, however, is that America’s apprenticeship system is ill-prepared to meet the challenge. We are not ready to process, track, report training for or retain 1 million new apprentices.

We must reimagine the entire system. Fixing the entrenched issues that plague our apprenticeship system must be a Trump administration priority for the sake of our economy, the affordability of essential goods and our national security.

The stakes are high. For instance, about 646,000 jobs are open in the construction industry. Those unfilled jobs have adverse multiplier effects on the economy. They are salaries not taken home and spent. They are lost productivity. They are homes and buildings that take longer to complete. They are higher financing costs for developers and higher interest rates for everyone else.

Most of all, they are higher housing costs. When housing is so expensive that 63% of Americans cannot afford to buy a home and nearly 50% of renting households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, Americans cannot afford for housing prices to skyrocket any further.

It’s not just the construction industry that’s dealing with workforce issues. About 1.9 million new positions are created in health care annually, and more than 960,000 in banking and finance. As many as 3.8 million unfilled manufacturing positions are projected over the next decade.

This is to say nothing of the benefits to those who would do these jobs. These are well-paying positions that usually do not require a college degree. In an era when male college graduates earn $1.5 million more over their lifetimes than their nongraduate counterparts and when underemployment sits just below 7% (on top of 4.1% unemployment), such missed opportunities have major social and cultural impacts.

Our haphazard apprenticeship system threatens our national security and economy. America struggles to produce enough military equipment, including ships and shells, to deter near-peer competitors such as China and aggressive adversaries such as Russia. Although there are a host of contributing factors, one of the largest is that we do not have the workforce to produce the military equipment we need to protect our interests. We won World War II on the strength of the “Arsenal of Democracy.” We cannot match that today.

We can fix this. We need to listen to what employers who want to run apprenticeship programs have told us for years. First and foremost, we need to include employers in the conversation about how we administer apprenticeships, and not just big companies. We need representatives of midsize firms and even smaller groups of craftsmen (think local plumbing or electrical service companies) that want to run small apprenticeship programs. We need their feedback and guidance.

Similarly, we must dramatically reduce the reporting burden on existing apprenticeships and the registration requirements to start such programs. The complexity of these processes demands an enormous time commitment and expensive attorneys. Only the biggest companies can afford to eat these costs, yet as small businesses employ nearly half of America’s workforce, the dynamic is unworkable. Worse yet, it curtails our ability to scale up innovative programs.

For instance, Trident Technical College has pioneered the process of enabling students to get apprenticeship credits from relevant high school classes. We should replicate this system at scale across the country, but our rigid system makes that impossible.

Next, we need to replace RAPIDS, the website that manages apprenticeship programs. The site is clunky, glitchy and slow, making uploading information difficult. It doesn’t collect useful data that could enable critical insights about future workforce needs, nor does it yield data and insights capable of proving return on investment to employers, a lack that makes recruitment difficult. It is an outdated legacy system ill-equipped for a digital world.

Finally, we must create a visible pipeline for employers and students. We need a system that can show employers how many potential apprentices they have for given jobs in given areas and give high school students a clear path, such as the classes to take and the forms to fill out, to get from where they are to an apprenticeship. That means collecting and farming data.

This is complex work, but luck alone will not fill 1 million apprenticeships.

Apprenticeship is a solution to so much of what ails America. Yet trying to pump 1 million new apprentices through a system that cannot receive them risks doing more harm than good. It will fail to produce the workforce we need and turn off a generation of employers to apprenticeships.

America needs to do this, which means we need to do it right.

• Laura Ward is vice president of Workforce Solutions for Aspire Technologies.