A very short history of some very long strides

With commentary by Lonnie Emard

IT’S BEEN LESS than 40 years since the concept of Registered Apprenticeships was first entered into Arkansas law, and just over a decade since apprenticeships beyond the trades began actually taking shape in the state. And yet today Arkansas ranks second in the nation, on a per-capita basis, in the number of apprenticeships created. Not only that, but the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently selected Arkansas to administer the national Advanced Manufacturing Apprenticeship Incentive Fund (AMAIF) grants, supporting apprenticeships in advanced manufacturing. It’s an impressive success story, the milestones and the acceptance signals of which are presented here in barebones timeline fashion, thanks to our partner-in-tech, ChatGPT. We’ve also included, in Italics, a vivid narrative history of these milestones by Apprenticely National Apprenticeship Director Lonnie Emard.

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1989: Apprenticeships are codified in Arkansas law

Milestone: Act 684 creates a legal apprenticeship framework in the state.
Acceptance signal: Apprenticeship is recognized as part of vocational education policy.

2015: Federal funding fuels expansion

Milestone: Arkansas receives a $4M American Apprenticeship Initiative grant to build apprenticeship infrastructure and partnerships in new sectors. 
Acceptance signal: State begins diversifying beyond traditional trades.

Early 2000s-2016: I was in South Carolina at Blue Cross in those days, and most people I knew still thought apprenticeships were only for electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. But at Blue Cross, we were venturing out, training in-house employees using what we called “apprenticeships.” We weren’t thinking about any great future national workforce impact, we were just trying to grow our own experts—including in IT.

Then this group called Apprentice Carolina came to us and said, “There’s a national registration for this, and you can get funding to support it.” So we started registering our apprenticeships with the DOL, and over a period of, say, 2006 to 2009, we processed nearly 300 apprentices.

That was the early, early stage of apprenticeships in this country. The real turning point came in 2016, when the DOL made $175M in grants available for Registered Apprenticeship expansion into non-traditional areas like IT and healthcare and manufacturing. That’s what started my consulting on apprenticeships, because there were states that got a lot of money and yet had no idea how to begin the apprenticeship process. What does it mean to have these occupational standards for an industrial maintenance person? An IT generalist? A medical assistant? All that was foreign terminology to people then. We’ve come a long way in 10 years.

2019: Launch of Arkansas Center for Data Sciences

Milestone: The nonprofit Arkansas Center for Data Sciences (ACDS) is established to grow IT and data-focused Registered Apprenticeships in the state. 
Acceptance signals:

• Apprenticeship officially enters the tech sector workforce ecosystem.
• ACDS leads employer-intermediary efforts to help companies adopt RA for
  data science, IT, cybersecurity, and other tech roles.
• It reflects state and employer recognition that traditional talent pipelines
  were insufficient for modern skills demand.

2019: Tech apprenticeship program expansion

Milestone: ACDS and the Northwest Arkansas Council launch a tech-focused apprenticeship program targeting data analytics, web development, cybersecurity, etc., with multiple regional partners. 
Acceptance signal: Regional economic leadership (e.g., NWA Council) publicly endorses apprenticeship’s role in talent development.

2019: One of the states I consulted for was Arkansas, and I remember Bill Yoder getting in touch with me in the spring of 2019. He was the newly appointed Executive Director of this just-launched nonprofit called ACDS, which at the time boasted two and a half fulltime employees—including Bill—and one quarter-time contract person. He told me all about their ambitious goals and asked if I would help get this enterprise off the ground. Soon I was flying a couple of times a month from South Carolina to Arkansas…but before long, I took the plunge and became a fulltime employee of ACDS as well.

2020: Early programs and partnerships grow

Milestone: Pre-apprenticeship programs in IT fields open through partnerships involving ACDS, UA Workforce Development, and workforce partners. 
Acceptance signal: Apprenticeship bridging pathways begin connecting training, education, and workforce systems.

2020: We were focused on technology and IT back then, and that very first software developer cohort that started in late 2019 and rolled into 2020 was an example of a community cohort that was the epitome of what we’ve always wanted to do every time. You had multiple employers all with the same desire for a particular occupation, bringing economies of scale. We followed that first cohort up with another community cohort, cybersecurity, and then the data analyst cohort. So those were three main areas in IT and those were three distinct ways that we offered the apprenticeship to multiple companies that had a common demand.

Then COVID happened in early 2020. Our response to that was remarkable because we didn’t skip a beat. We were so new that it didn’t make much difference—it was just another thing thrown at us. Suddenly apprenticeships weren’t just for big companies. In the midst of COVID, some small and medium-size companies wouldn’t have survived had they not had us and the apprenticeship model, because they weren’t getting candidates with four-year degrees. They needed some other avenue. And if they didn’t find the talent quickly in the midst of everyone working remotely, well…. COVID created that demand for technology and IT, and we met that demand. That carried us through 2020 and was the start of developing our can-do identity.

2021–2024: Institutional growth & alliance building

Milestone: Partnerships between ACDS and educational institutions like the University of Arkansas at Little Rock expand hands-on pathways for computer science students as apprentices/interns. 
Acceptance signal: Higher education begins formally recognizing and connecting to apprenticeship as a co-curricular/career pathway.

2021: At first, it took us working with 30 companies to get to our first 90 apprentices, and we wondered: Is it going to be like this forever? I remember telling Bill, “We’re going to get some larger cohorts from companies and that’s going to change the ratio.” We did the first Walmart cohort later in the year, and that became our best “company” cohort. So now we had experience doing both community cohorts and single-company cohorts.

Later, when we crossed the 1,000-apprentice milestone, we had about 140 employers, and when we hit the 2,000-apprentice goal, it was right at 200. So the ratio did improve a lot—it’s about one company to 10 apprentices. That’s held true because we still get the new startups at one or two apprentices, along with the big companies that want to have a larger cohort. But that first Walmart cohort was the one that really exercised our true ability to do everything end to end at large scale.

Two other big things that happened in 2021: We started spending significant time with the state—Cody Waits and others at the Office of Skills Development (OSD)—helping them bring PeopleShores to Pine Bluff. During COVID, PeopleShores had decided they wanted to locate a facility in Arkansas but they didn’t know exactly where, until they picked Pine Bluff. So that was a labor of love for about eight to 10 months, figuring out how that was going to work.

That has really paid off. PeopleShores will probably do close to 500 apprentices this year, and they’re in multiple locations around the country—and we’re their apprenticeship sponsor everywhere. It’s a great partnership. Their presence has been really impactful to the Pine Bluff economy.

Also in 2021 we realized that all this growth meant we needed to expand our project management office. Registered Apprenticeships require a lot of paperwork and coordinating with the DOL, and we calculated that we needed to have a project manager for about every 400 active apprentices. That exercise was essentially figuring out how we were going to scale based on one of the most critical roles, which is the detailed operational implementation of the apprenticeships.

2022: The Arkansas Department of Higher Education (ADHE) won the “Closing the Skills Gap” grant, and we at ACDS became the operational arm and delivered everything besides ADHE’s fiscal management. To me, that Closing the Skills Gap arrangement was important because it proved that our model of growth with the right funding was going to work at scale without just trusting the state of Arkansas for all our future money.

Around the same time, we began to go after our first Walton Family Foundation grant. So now suddenly we had state, we had federal, and we had private funding—all three tiers of braided funding, That’s a really important milestone.

Another is when we began thinking about doing apprenticeships beyond the IT sector. At Walmart, we trained IT people, but there were all these other fields—retail, supply chain, facilities maintenance—and we realized that any company of any size didn’t just have IT. And while we were stuck saying we only supported IT, it was clear that, with our end-to-end model, we had to start thinking about how we could really do this for any occupation. We would stay clear of trades and construction because that was a well-oiled machine. But everything else was fair game.

Eventually we did begin doing expanded apprenticeship work for Walmart—truck drivers, TK, and TK—both in Arkansas and in other states. So we were poised and ready for what came next.

2023: That spring, Bill and I attended the Closing the Skills Gap meeting in Washington, DC, which was our first time to get together with all the other grantees from around the country. There we realized that our apprenticeship model was unique, while all these other organizations were still trying to figure out how to do apprenticeships. There were groups that “got it,” and groups that didn’t. But the one revelation to me was that while the Missouri Chamber said they were focused on IT, that actually led them to the healthcare sector. They had one big healthcare organization they were working with—Cerner, I think it was—and when they gave their presentation, I was overwhelmed. We were doing 800 apprentices at that time, and they were doing like 2,500. It was a huge number.

Soon after that, Cerner got bought by somebody and they came in and said, “We don’t want to do apprenticeships.” So they had to cancel 2,000 of them, and we came in and got about 300 more apprentices using Cerner’s federal money. But here’s what this experience told me. As we moved to new sectors, healthcare was going to be the big thing.

In 2023 we also began working with April Ambrose and the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association (AAEA), the idea being that they were going to start doing these alternative energy things and they wanted to use apprenticeships. At first, AAEA wanted to replicate our model, but that didn’t really make sense. So eventually we just brought April onboard at ACDS with a dotted line relationship to AAEA. In time, though, she realized that AAEA’s work was more than just talking to employers about apprenticeship and workforce; it was also about being political advocates for alternative energy, and April was spending a lot of time doing that. So she moved back to AAEA and now whenever she gets an employer ready to do an apprenticeship, we shepherd them through the process.

This experience is important because, as we start expanding our work across the country and teaming up other partners in various states, they may be the ones who dictate how they work with their members or their various employers, but should they have to create their own apprenticeship sponsorship system? Or can they just turn to us to do that part for them? The AAEA experience taught us that that model can work for everyone.

April 2024: ACDS rebrands as Apprenticely

Milestone: This rebranding, after ~5 years, reflects expanded work across industries, not just data science. 
Acceptance signals:

• Apprenticeship has matured from a niche tech pipeline to multi-industry workforce solution.
• The new brand marks acceptance by employers and the state of a broader talent-development mission.

2024: That year was all about working with OSD. They had the chance to receive what was called “formula funding,” an initiative by the DOL to start giving states money based on their apprenticeship activity, and this funding could increase each year. So obviously a formula would give more money to a bigger state because they’d done more stuff, but at the same time, it would accurately reflect the activity of an Arkansas versus a Mississippi or a Louisiana or whatever. And because of our growth, that number was pretty high and increased each year. This formula funding plan is called the State Apprenticeship Expansion Fund (SAEF).

The usual problem with grant solicitations is that you get hundreds of people scrambling around the country trying to figure out how to submit, and half the ones that win are just getting started and they don’t deliver much. That’s why it’s best to put the available money in the hands of the people who’re actually delivering results. So SAEF was important because we were already working in multiple sectors, because of Walmart, and now we had an avenue to pay for people to oversee our healthcare and manufacturing work. Also, in 2024 we had made the decision to become Apprenticely, which we would announce in 2025.

2018–2025: Continued statewide apprenticeship integration

Milestones:

• Arkansas integrates apprenticeship into workforce and national WIOA policy frameworks.
• Scale metrics show rapid growth in apprentices and employers statewide.
• Governance structures (apprenticeship office, steering committees, rulemaking) mature.

Acceptance signal: Apprenticeship becomes fully institutionalized in state workforce strategy.

2025: Creation of State Apprenticeship Agency

Milestones:

• Act 695 establishes a State Apprenticeship Agency with official registration authority, governance, and oversight.
• Arkansas begins work to attain USDOL recognition as a state apprenticeship agency. 

Acceptance signal: RA is now a permanent state system with regulatory authority and formal oversight.

Late 2025–2026: National engagement and leadership

Milestone: Arkansas plays a key role in national manufacturing apprenticeship incentive efforts in partnership with federal agencies.
Acceptance signal: Arkansas is not just using apprenticeship widely—it’s helping shape national apprenticeship strategy.

2025: This is the year that healthcare exploded. It overtook IT, and we’ve since developed relationships with two big players in our state, UAMS and Arkansas Children’s, as well as with the Arkansas Rural Health Partnership. I think those three are all part of this relationship building that says, How are we addressing urban and rural health in terms of the state of Arkansas and beyond? Because obviously that’s led us to relationships with Heartland Whole Health, the Alice Walton School of Medicine, and all the things that are why people are now calling us and saying, “Hey, we want you involved in our proposal to be one of the main deliverers of healthcare apprenticeships in the country.”

Then near the end of 2025, with a diminished DOL, we saw the formation of the Apprenticeship for America (AFA) organization. That, along with the movement toward pay-for-performance legislation, has really been beneficial for us, and has put us in perfect position for even more dramatic growth in the future.