Why “youth apprenticeships” are the coming thing

Lonnie Emard

IT SEEMS LIKE our country’s businesses can’t get enough talent. The world is changing faster than ever, and every aspect of business, from internal operations to the supply chain to future planning, are changing with it. Colleges can’t fill the gap, and that’s one reason that Registered Apprenticeships have become so popular. With more than 1400 occupations considered “apprenticeable,” Apprenticely has registered 70 occupations across a half dozen sectors as more and more companies are turning to apprenticeships not just as a viable alternative hiring strategy, but also as a way of growing their own dedicated and loyal talent supply. Employers have learned that apprenticeships aren’t just about entry-level positions; they can use them to help effect their internal succession planning as well.

With such wide and deep demand for apprenticeships, it should come as no surprise that we at Apprenticely are now talking with younger and younger candidates for these roles. We’ve written before in this newsletter about Be Pro Be Proud and their successful Draft Day efforts, in which high schools across Arkansas invite employers to come meet students even before they’ve graduated—and vice versa. Draft Day also allows young people on the cusp of deciding about the next stage of their lives to meet employers and learn about all the possibilities and opportunities that await them.

This year, there are 11 Draft Days taking place between February 27 and April 29, and Apprenticely is attending every one of them. It’s a fascinating experience to talk with these these high school juniors and seniors and to watch them interact with potential employers. For the most part, these students are not only unsure of what their future will be, but also of what they want it to be. Should they go to a four-year college? Should they pursue a two-year Associate’s degree? Should they jump right into the workforce in some way? What field is the right one for them? What should they be preparing themselves for?

The option of what we call a “youth apprenticeship” can help answer those questions, and perhaps the most welcome answer of all is that they don’t have to be facing an “either/or” situation right now. Because a youth apprenticeship allows them to earn while they learn—in other words, it allows them to take on a working role in a company while actually still staying in school. In fact, to qualify for a youth apprenticeship, you must be considered a fulltime student. Even so, a person in a youth apprenticeship is also considered a fulltime employee while working at the company only 20 hours a week, giving them time in their schedule to complete their high school or college studies. The youth apprenticeship still requires all of the same training and competencies for a particular job or a particular occupation, but that training can be spread out over a longer period of time. That’s the real benefit.

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OF THOSE 70 apprenticeable jobs I mentioned earlier, we might take only a portion to register for youth apprenticeships. For example, an employer might say, “Yeah, I’ll hire somebody to do some tech support. I’ll hire somebody to be a medical assistant. I’ll hire somebody to be a manufacturing operator.” So, there are a handful of these occupations, maybe 15 or 20 out of the 70, that we’ll set up as youth apprenticeships—while we’re starting the same process with employers.

This is a win-win for both employers and apprentices. For employers, it gives them the chance to connect much earlier with a candidate they really like. They then have a formal way of continuing that relationship—not as a temp or as someone who’s only going to be around for three months. With a youth apprenticeship, this young person is working with this employer fulltime under this status, the idea being that when they finish school, nothing changes except we move them from one type of an apprenticeship to the other, and they go from 20 hours a week to 40. That’s it. As for the apprentice, he or she gets to learn early not only about a particular occupation, but about the working world—this while still pursuing their education. There’s still time to shift gears, make changes, refine their educational goals and make career-path decisions—all while earning a salary as a fulltime employee.

Youth apprenticeships are a very, very new initiative for Apprenticely. At the moment, we have fewer than 10 such apprenticeships in the works across the state. At these Be Pro Be Proud Draft Days, we see our job as presenting what I call a kind of “apprenticeship 101” education to attending employers. Many of them feel a goodwill motivation to give some of these high school students a chance to learn about their company, but they tend not to immediately recognize an option for actually hiring them. Last year we talked with somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 companies at Draft Days throughout the state, and 22 of them actually began to implement apprenticeships. They didn’t do it as youth apprenticeships a year ago, and many of them still question whether or not they could even bring somebody of that age onboard—especially manufacturers, who can’t hire anyone under the age of 18. And, yes, for that kind of work there are safety issues, but there are still plenty of occupations that these student-apprentices can do.

Education and application—that’s the key. Just recently we were at the Draft Day in Russellville, where we met five different healthcare providers that we’d never met before. That was a great example of how we keep getting the word out to more and more companies. And, by the way, the participating students in Russellville were very interested in these healthcare companies and the kinds of jobs they were hiring for—patient care techs, medical assistants, pharmacy techs, and more.

I’m often asked if employers we’ve worked with on “regular” apprenticeships are more likely to embrace youth apprenticeships, and the answer is, not exactly. They will certainly consider youth apprenticeships, because in today’s world they know they need to be thinking about every possible avenue of finding potentially new candidates. This opens a door in a lot of cases. Because if they say, “I’m concerned about liability,” our answer is to present them with the option of a work-based learning internship, which gives the student-employee an on-ramp. Or the employer might say, “I don’t want to put them on my payroll until we’re more confident,” or, “We have concerns about turnover.” In that case, the concept of staffing firms or Apprenticely putting them on their payroll for a period of time comes into play, so the employers can give these young people a test drive before actually hiring.

At Apprenticely, we’ve delved deeply into the ways apprenticeship have affected mature career changers. They’ve either been dislocated because of a layoff or they’re finding that new opportunity. But any reluctance to hire them is usually related to an employer wondering if they can make the transition. In the case of youth apprenticeships, the reluctance seems to be a feeling that these candidates just aren’t ready. This idea of hiring younger candidates can feel like a risky thing, unless they demonstrate a certain maturity, while the students see themselves as absolutely ready. They want to be challenged by going directly into work. But they want to do meaningful work.

This combination of employer expectations and youth capabilities can come together nicely in an apprenticeship program. We at Apprenticely look forward to demonstrating this powerful combination as we support employers in this “Next Frontier” for workforce talent.
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Lonnie Emard is Apprenticely’s National Apprenticeship Director.