You may picture an apprentice swinging a hammer or wearing a hardhat. But today’s apprentices might just as easily be teaching your kids at school, training as your future lawyer or accountant, or even out at sea fishing for your dinner – as detailed in our WorkingNation original video How to Get Commercial Fishing Jobs Without College.
The apprenticeship landscape is changing rapidly. The number of active apprentices has almost doubled in the past decade as a wider range of professions is adopting the industry-driven, earn-and-learn tool to build workforces.
“Apprenticeship has historically really been understood to be connected to the skilled trades,” says John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, an advocacy organization for apprenticeships.
“In the last 10 years, it has … expanded to these other sectors and occupations, and health care, and information technology, and business services, education, whole variety of different things.”
Colborn has heard about registered apprenticeships to train lawyers, accountants, registered nurses, software engineers, even equine therapists – just about any profession that requires specialized expertise.
Public School Teacher: ‘One of the Fastest Growing Areas of Apprenticeship’
In fact, of the 678,014 active apprentices in the United States, the most rapidly increasing sectors might be outside of the skilled trades and construction, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s ApprenticeshipUSA.
That includes “educational services,” where the number of active apprentices has grown 113% to 83,777 since fiscal year 2015, outpacing the 88.5% growth in active apprentices overall.
“In the last year, one of the fastest growing areas of apprenticeship has been for the public school teacher,” Colborn says in a recent episode of the Work in Progress podcast. “And if you know anything about public education, you know there’s a crisis around hiring teachers. And yet it turns out that there’s a lot of talent in every single school. They happen to be teachers’ aides or cafeteria workers.
“They know the students, students that know what it is to work in a school and the idea of using an apprenticeship structure to advance folks from these roles into a schoolteacher role has caught on across the states and vast majority, 40-some states, are now engaged in teacher apprenticeship of one sort or another,” he explains.
Other rapidly growing sectors include “health care and social assistance,” where 18,824 active apprentices represent a 928% increase since fiscal year 2015, “professional, scientific, and technical services,” where 4,126 active apprentices amount to a whopping 1,463% increase, “finance and insurance,” where 709 active apprenticeships are a 396 percent increase, and “arts, entertainment, and recreation,” where the 377 active apprentices are 598% more than in FY 2015.
Apprenticeships Have a Long History
Apprenticeships, of course, are nothing new. In fact, they are far older than America itself, dating back thousands of years. Even some of our founding fathers, including Ben Franklin, George Washington and Paul Revere, worked as apprentices, Colborn notes – though back then apprenticeships may have been more localized.
That changed during the Great Depression in the 1930s, when the United States established standardized registered apprenticeships to develop the workforce and allow workers to earn credentials recognized industry-wide.
Roughly a decade ago, after studies suggested registered apprenticeship was one of the most cost-effective methods of training workers, advocates in federal and state governments began to tout them as a broader workforce development solution, and the number of programs began growing faster.
But even though U.S. apprentices have nearly doubled in number since 2015, they remain far less common than they are in other parts of the world, such as in Canada and Europe. However, some U.S. apprenticeship advocates argue that the comparison may not be appropriate because apprenticeships abroad are structured differently – often driven by governments and woven more tightly into educational systems at the high-school level.
How U.S. Registered Apprenticeships Work
In the U.S., registered apprenticeships can be funded through a combination of government and private grants and get validated by the U.S. Department of Labor or state government agencies. Workers who pass through them earn industry-recognized credentials that are accepted nationwide.
Perhaps most importantly, apprentices are hired and paid for their work, even as they learn.
“I hate when people don’t understand the difference between an apprenticeship program and an internship program,” says Jane Oates, who is a senior policy advisor at WorkingNation and was involved in boosting apprenticeships with the Department of Labor during the Obama administration.
“An apprentice is an employee from day one with all the rights and responsibilities of an employee, and then as they learn more, they progress into better-paying and better-title jobs,” she says. “You hear people say you get a job at the end of an apprenticeship. No, that would be on-the-job training or an internship.”
Experts tout apprenticeships’ effectiveness at getting workers paid and on the job quickly without necessarily making a costly investment in college.
“I think that it’s a really good education model, especially for people who cannot put their lives on hold to go to college for two or four years,” says Madeline Boehm, a registered apprenticeship program manager in Helena, Mont., for the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), which facilitates health care apprenticeships. “I think it works really well in rural communities.”
She and others note that apprenticeships find favor as a workforce development solution across the political spectrum.
“Apprenticeship crosses party lines,” she says. “I think that one thing that the governor of Florida and the governor of California agree is they’re both really supporting registered apprenticeship. And I don’t anticipate that changing much.”
Expanding Opportunity and Developing a Loyal Workforce
Andrew Cortés, president and CEO of Building Futures, which facilitates the creation of registered apprenticeship programs within the state of Rhode Island, adds that apprenticeships can allow employers to develop loyal workforces customized to their needs, can expand opportunities to less-experienced candidates, and open up career pathways that might otherwise require college degrees.
“If you really want to be serious about equity in post-secondary education, then there needs to be more earn-and-learn opportunities,” Cortés says. “If they want to obtain a career that normally requires a baccalaureate degree or an associate’s degree but can’t afford to pay that money upfront and then hope to get a job at the end, the apprenticeship system is a way that you could earn and learn at the same time.”
The pay may not be high at first, but the programs are designed to step up compensation steadily as apprentices gain expertise. And once trained, apprentices seem to stick around, with 94% of apprentices retaining employment after finishing their apprenticeships, according to ApprenticeshipUSA.
How Apprenticeships Are Born
New apprentice programs arise when an agency, industry group, or employer suggests one, Cortés says, and a facilitator such as himself is able to work with a state or federal agency to establish it.
He and Boehm say that in regulated industries such as health care, a facilitator will then investigate industry standards and design the apprenticeship to ensure apprentices are trained to exceed them.
“One of those myths is that apprenticeship is a way to circumvent regulations, and it’s really not,” Boehm says. “It’s a way to enhance current regulatory practices.”
Whether or not the industry is regulated, best practices can be gleaned from the people already working in the professions, Cortés adds.
“One of the very first things we ask for is an interview with the most competent worker,” he says. “And then we start to unpack what’s in that worker’s head about how they learn their occupation, in what sequence, how it should be outlined so that somebody new to whatever that occupation happens to be, can be a productive worker from day one.”
From Idea to Implementation
Once they have an idea of what needs to be taught, the facilitator will bring in educational partners such as community colleges to fill any gaps on-the-job training can’t provide, and the U.S. Department of Labor or state apprenticeship agency validates the pathway.
Cortés and Boehm note that, in addition to serving less-experienced candidates, apprenticeships also can be designed to allow candidates to build on existing experience to elevate career pathways.
For instance, Boehm notes that while entry-level candidates might qualify for apprenticeships as certified nurse assistants or home health aides, candidates for registered nurse apprenticeships or other programs might require some existing qualifications. She cites a Tennessee-based program – for aspiring intraoperative neuromonitoring technicians, professionals who monitor brain activity during brain surgery – that only serves people who already have bachelor’s degrees.
Cortés and Building Futures have helped set up more than 40 apprenticeships in Rhode Island involving nearly 200 employers covering a wide range of fields, including the skilled trades and construction, but also health care, early childhood education, manufacturing, and more, he says.
Commercial Fishing Apprenticeship
He has even helped facilitate a registered apprenticeship for commercial fishing.
In a WorkingNation video about that program, Fred Mattera, a longtime fisherman who is now the executive director of the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island (CFRI), says with rebounding fishing stocks driving a revived demand for crews, he wanted to draw younger workers to the workforce while emphasizing safety standards and training for what can be a hazardous profession.
“We just can’t go out to get warm bodies to say, ‘Here, take ‘em fishing,’” he says in the video. “We need(ed) to start a program.”
Offered through the CFRI and the University of Rhode Island, the commercial fishing apprenticeship has expanded from 2 to 12 employer partners and registered 81 apprentices since launching in 2017.
One of those apprentices, Kameron Rebello, featured in WorkingNation’s original 2018 coverage, remains at sea as an engineer on F/V Odyssey and F/V Trade Winds, training to become a fill-in captain for the 2025 season.
How Registered Apprenticeships Can Lift People Up
He’s just one example of someone lifted up by an apprenticeship. Boehm, of H-CAP, the health care apprenticeship organization, says she has heard of others, including one involving a certified nurse aid apprentice.
“I was in a meeting with some partners in St. Louis and … I talked to a woman who started her apprenticeship living in her car with her two children,” Boehm says. “She talked about [how] through the course of the apprenticeship, because there’s wage increases and job security, she was able to secure an apartment and she talks about what it was like to walk into that apartment for the first time with her two children and know that they were safe and actually had a home.
“I think anybody you talk to in apprenticeship has stories like that,” she says.
Cortés says he loves “the transformative impact of the registered apprenticeship model.”
“I think it’s a great agreement between an employer and an employee around their learning and their wage progression in their career,” he says. “But I also like the fact that it allows us to extend the opportunities further down to those who are struggling in society. And that’s what keeps me coming to work every day.”
Watch Now: How to Get Commercial Fishing Jobs Without College
