A FEW MONTHS ago, people in the apprenticeship space in Arkansas received calls from a reporter for National Public Radio. She wanted to know more about the fact that the State of Arkansas had been selected by the U.S. Department of Labor to administer a major national fund for apprenticeships in manufacturing. After a lot of back and forth, including the holidays and a major snowstorm, Andrea Hsu did come to Little Rock to get her story. In fact, she got more than one. Here’s the story of those stories.
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Hello, Andrea, and welcome again. Tell us what prompted you to travel to Arkansas for these pieces?
I cover labor and workforce issues, and my entire 2025 was pretty much eaten up by what was happening with the federal workforce, because there were so many huge changes. But toward the end of the year, I started wanting to branch out and look at how workers outside the federal workforce are doing. During the Biden administration, I had seen a lot of emails about apprenticeships, but I had just never dived into the topic. And now I saw that there was a focus on apprenticeships under the Trump administration as well.
I had this vague notion that apprenticeships are something used to great effect in other countries, but, to be honest, I didn’t realize that apprenticeships existed in fields like IT and healthcare—fields outside the building trades. So I started reading online about apprenticeships. At that point, I wasn’t even aware of the president’s executive order from last April setting out this goal of one million apprenticeships in the country. So I read about that and watched some webinars on the topic, and at some point I got connected with someone at the Urban Institute, and then at Apprenticeships for America (AFA). Somewhere along the way, somebody mentioned that Arkansas had been selected to administer this incentive fund for manufacturing. And then someone else—it may have been Zach Boren at AFA—actually mentioned Apprenticely by name. So I looked at their website and sent an email, and Lonnie Emard, Apprenticely’s national apprenticeship director, wrote me back the same day. This was back in early December. And we talked soon after that.
That AMAIF/Arkansas arrangement hadn’t even been announced yet, had it?
No, that’s what Lonnie told me! “This is really for the state officials to announce,” he said, “so we don’t have much information that we can share until we know what our role’s going to be.” In the meantime, though, he filled me in on the whole history of apprenticeships in Arkansas.
After I first talked with Lonnie, I wrote to the U.S. Department of Labor, but didn’t hear from them right away. I also reached out to the people in Arkansas’ Workforce Connections Office (WCO), and they called me back. “We’d love to tell you more about this when it’s been announced,” they said.
So I knew this thing existed, but nobody could give me any information about it. Everybody in Washington was like, “Why is this going to Arkansas?” and “This seems kind of out there. Arkansas manufacturing—really?” But after talking with Lonnie and everything he’d told me, I thought, Okay, this really isn’t so “out there.” Arkansas has been quietly—to the outside world, anyway—working away at this since 2019.
When the AMAIF grant was finally announced, the Arkansas WCO folks got back to me and said, “Okay, let’s talk. Do you want to do an interview?” And I thought, I’d love to come to Arkansas. So then I got back on the phone with Lonnie and Apprenticely Executive Director Bill Yoder and told them I wanted to come visit. They were very welcoming, and we talked about a couple of story ideas. I settled on Virco Manufacturing because they make school furniture, and it’s always helpful if you’re reporting on something that people are familiar with. Well, school furniture, I thought. I’ve seen furniture in my son’s school here in Washington, DC. So I figured people could connect with that story.
I was going to ask about how you chose your angle, but I see that Lonnie and Bill helped you find your story.
Yes, they told me how ACDS started with a focus on IT, and after Governor Sanders came in in 2022, she was like, “Hey, why not do this in other sectors?” They also made clear there were other groups involved, that Apprenticely isn’t responsible for all the growth of apprenticeships in Arkansas. But with registering 2500+ apprenticeships since 2019, they’ve done a fair chunk of it.
By the time I came out to Little Rock in February, I had spoken with Lonnie multiple times and he had mentioned Virco and Pulaski Technical College, which is the partner in the Virco apprenticeship, and then Apprenticely is the intermediary. Normally, I would reach out to companies myself, and I did research Virco on my own. It’s a publicly traded company, so they have annual reports and all that, and of course there’s also quite a lot of information online about Apprenticely.
So how was your actual visit to Arkansas?
It was short and fast—I only stayed in Arkansas for two nights. I was supposed to come the week before, but there was a big snowstorm both in Arkansas and here in DC, so we ended up delaying a week. And then I got in very late.
The next morning I met up with Lonnie and Jenny Sales, Apprenticely’s client development manager for manufacturing, and we all went to Virco. We spent a few hours there, and then I went to the Department of Commerce and met with Cody Waits at WCO. I had actually been communicating with his team. And that evening, Lonnie and Cody and I went to dinner together. That was a great opportunity just to have more time to talk and understand the issues without the microphone on. I always find that so valuable because you just learn so much more when you can just sit and chat.
The next morning, I did some sit-down interviews with Lonnie and Jenny. Then from there, we went to Pulaski Tech and spent a few hours there and met up again with the Virco apprentice, Caleb Moss, and also talked with the people at the community college. It was all great. And my regret every time after I do a reporting trip is that I have so many hours of tape and the shows are pretty stingy with the amount of air time.
That was one of my questions. There’s so much production for such short pieces, which requires a whole lot of very careful editing. A lot of listeners probably don’t appreciate that. But I think you did a great job on both of the pieces you did in Arkansas.
Oh, I appreciate that. It’s changed over the years, but generally speaking it’s very hard to get pieces on air that are more than four minutes long. Five is a stretch. But yeah, I always end up with way too much material, and I come back and I’m so deep into it and I know all the history and all the nuances that I now know.
Here’s an example: For this story, I know that it was a really big deal that this money coming from the DOL is based on pay for performance. I talked extensively with Lonnie about this, and I talked to people at the state level in Arkansas and also at DOL. So I had written these whole sections about that, and my editors, who are kind of proxies for the average listener, felt that it was too much. In a way, they’re where I was last December, at the basic “What is an apprenticeship?” level.
One of the stories I originally turned in was almost seven minutes long, and I had to cut it back to five. In a radio story, if you try to cram too much information in, people just get lost and they tune out. Especially these days. So later I’m going to do a podcast that repackages those pieces in different ways. I’m also going to have a written story, like a print story with photos on our website.
What do you think you learned, both about Arkansas and apprenticeships, during your visit?
Well, it was really great getting to meet with the employer at Virco, because I’ve been reading that the workforce is aging and that manufacturers, especially, face a shortage of skilled labor. And at Virco, I got to see that firsthand and hear from Steve Presley, the general manager, that they’ve had several 40-year employees retire since January 1! And they have all this new, very high-tech state-of-the-art machinery and they need multiple people who can run all of these machines. Because if somebody’s out sick or on vacation, they can’t have a week of downtime. So I understood the urgency of it.
I also understood, through my many hours of conversations with Lonnie, how apprenticeships can solve this problem—and that the challenge is to convince employers to consider people who won’t immediately check all the boxes. I also saw that in action at Virco. They have a very good employee who doesn’t have a college degree, but who they could see is good at math. He’s an analytical thinker, able to problem-solve. So they decided to give him the training and fill a gap with somebody who’s already a known quantity to them. Getting to see that made me understand apprenticeships in a much more concrete way. That’s in the manufacturing space, of course, and I hope I get to see it in other fields as well, like healthcare. We always hear about shortages here and shortages there, and if there’s a way to do the same thing that I was seeing in Arkansas in other fields, I could see how that could lift up workers and employers both.
This is a very interesting time to be covering labor and workforce in the U.S. If you were delivering a State of the Workforce Address, what would your message be?
Oh, wow.
I know—sorry! But when you do manage to get away from Washington, what are you seeing?
I think that it’s highly varied across the country how workers are doing. I mean, in 2023 I was covering the auto worker strike. I see how trade policies have really hurt workers in this country, and that there are all the challenges that the Arkansas manufacturer talked about, like competition from imports. There’s a lot of work to be done to get back to what the president calls the “golden age” of America.
I think the reality is that a lot of people are not earning very much money. A lot of people don’t even earn a living wage. I hear from workers that they feel like they’re not really getting ahead. A lot of them feel that their parents maybe had it better than they do, and they’re worried for their children.
Have you done much reporting on A.I. and the workforce?
No, I haven’t actually. I’ve done a little bit, but that’s another really scary thing for a lot of industries. I think it’s going to be hugely disruptive, which is one reason I’m interested in talking to manufacturers and people in construction and healthcare. These are industries that I wouldn’t say are A.I. proof—robots are certainly used in manufacturing—but you’re going to still need people to do some key jobs. But yes, A.I. is an area that I definitely need to focus on.
Well, thanks for talking with us, and for coming out to see what’s going on with Apprenticeships in Arkansas. We were very excited that NPR was interested in this story.
Well, it was great to be there, and I really appreciated everyone’s help. Lonnie is so great at explaining things, and he’s had such an interesting background—did you know he was a minor league baseball player?
I did know that. I once told him I was a New York Yankees fan, and his response was, “That’s unfortunate.” Lonnie takes his apprenticeships and his baseball very seriously.
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To listen to Andrea Hsu’s NPR stories on apprenticeships in Arkansas, please click on
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/03/nx-s1-5717470/trump-wants-to-create-1-million-apprenticeships-arkansas-is-spearheading-the-effort and
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/03/nx-s1-5616268/an-arkansas-manufacturer-pins-hope-on-apprenticeships.