The Director’s Chair

IN LATE 2018 WHEN the nonprofit now known as Apprenticely was formed as the Arkansas Center for Data Sciences (ACDS), most people thought that apprenticeships were a quaint remnant of the Industrial Revolution, if not Europe’s Middle Ages, relevant now mostly to the trades and construction. Eight years later, apprenticeships are fully accepted as an accessible, affordable hiring strategy, and we’re talking across the board, from IT to healthcare, retail to manufacturing, logistics to banking, energy to office processes. And apprenticeships aren’t only for new hires. Employers have discovered that the pipeline of apprenticeships can also help them with their succession planning.

Meanwhile, we at ACDS/Apprenticely have placed 2000+ apprentices in new careers with more than 200 Arkansas employers of all sizes and sectors—that’s second best on a per-capita basis of any state in the entire nation, an achievement largely enabled by the State of Arkansas’ forward-looking leadership in regard to apprenticeships. And now the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), focusing on the president’s goal of creating one million active apprentices, is awarding grants supporting apprenticeships across targeted industry sectors. The first grant is the Advanced Manufacturing Apprenticeship Incentive Fund (AMAIF). It will be followed later in the second quarter of 2026 by grants for shipbuilding and defense industrial base; artificial intelligence; semiconductor, and nuclear energy infrastructure; information technology; healthcare; transportation; and telecommunication. These grants are funded based on a “pay-for-performance” basis—you receive funding when you actually register an apprentice. There’s also a federal Rural Transformation grant that Arkansas has received directly for in-state distribution.

What does all this mean? It means that Registered Apprenticeships have shed their once-misunderstood image and are now prestigious. It means that more U.S. workers have an on-ramp to well-paying careers. It means that U.S. employers have a positive-ROI way of staffing their businesses. It means that U.S. educational systems now have a partner in producing qualified job candidates for America’s workforce. It means that more money, both government and private, will be made available for apprenticeships.

To the above, we at Apprenticely would add this: Since “intermediaries” like us—the one-stop shops between the employers and the DOL that handle all of the talent acquisition, training, and Registered Apprenticeship paperwork—are the key to this hiring strategy’s success and growth, this booming moment in apprenticeships should also mean that hard-earned credibility such as ours ensures continuing sustainability.

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WITHOUT EMPLOYERS, THERE are no apprenticeships. With that in mind, consider the following ways that Apprenticely helps employers take full advantage of the apprenticeship hiring model:

• Making Apprenticeships Understandable: We’ve cracked the code on how to communicate to employers the benefits of Registered Apprenticeships, beginning with explaining how we take care of all the paperwork required by the DOL.
• Making Apprenticeships Pay: We’ve figured out how to make Registered Apprenticeships not just easy for employers, but also a positive Return on Investment. Working with us, employers have no staffing firm fees, no headhunter fees, no downtime in productivity while they search for the perfect candidate. Meanwhile, apprenticeships guarantee a better retention rate, which whittles down any costs of attrition. In fact, for each dollar employers invest in apprenticeships with us, they get back $1.47.
• Working All Sectors: When we began, our apprenticeship strategy was focused solely on IT. Today we help employers in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, transportation, logistics, financial services, energy, and many other sectors. We’re now even operating nationwide for a couple of large clients.
• Producing Economic Impact: By facilitating the new careers of so many Registered Apprentices in Arkansas, Apprenticely positively impacts our state’s economy. In 2021, the economic impact of new wages was $13,905,000; in 2022, it was $36,120,000; in 2023, it was $67,620,000; in 2024, it was $82,056,000; and we calculate the cumulative economic impact of apprenticeships from 2020 through 2025 to be $215,000,000.

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“THE WORD SUSTAINABLE has become trendy,” then-ACDS Chairman Charles Morgan wrote in an article about apprenticeships in the debut issue of our newsletter back in March 2019, “but I think it’s a useful word to consider here. To my mind, the stories our apprentices tell about some of their friends’ initial experience in the working world—that is, of being a new employee left totally alone to find his or her way—is ultimately unsustainable, for employee and company alike. Skilled people are the key to our success as employers, so it behooves us to do everything we can to help them succeed. Because when they succeed, we succeed.”

In other words, we’re all in this together. Looking forward to helping you employers sustain your own successes, for many years to come.

–Bill Yoder
Executive Director