Today’s high school students, tomorrow’s workforce all stars
Lonnie Emard
THIS IS A story about Youth Apprenticeships and baseball—well, more precisely about the process by which Major League Baseball (MLB) keeps itself young, vibrant, and competitive. The Youth Apprenticeship concept isn’t just a typical hiring strategy for an employer; it’s going to be a new frontier. We’re pioneering new ground, while taking a lesson from how MLB franchises have invested in building a sustainable pipeline of talent.
As defined by the U.S. Department of Labor, a Youth Apprenticeship is “a structured, work-based learning program for individuals aged 18–24 that combines academic and technical classroom instruction with paid, hands-on work experience under the supervision of a skilled mentor.”
Youth Apprenticeships offer employers a way to identify and source younger talent when they’re still in high school or college—to “draft” them, if you will, by offering them a Youth Apprenticeship to work a certain number of hours a month for the employer while they finish their schooling and continue their seasoning. In terms of process, it’s not much different than a major league ball club drafting a high school pitching phenom and then starting to groom him for a spot on the roster sometime in the future. This is what Major League Baseball calls the “farm system” in baseball, because they’re essentially growing their own future talent.
Key to our model is that a Youth Apprenticeship is exactly the same as a regular Registered Apprenticeship in terms of the skill set. The competency is the same. The only thing that changes is that everyone involved has to add length or duration to how long it’s going to take to finish, because Youth Apprentices aren’t required to be in the office 40 hours a week like regular apprentices. That’s really a critical part of the understanding by the student, the school, the parents, the employer, and the employer’s HR people. Everybody agrees up front to respect the unique parameters of this model.
As Apprenticely Executive Director Bill Yoder wrote in one of his recent columns for this newsletter, “In Arkansas, the yearly number of high school graduates, from both public and private schools, is close to 40,000. About 60 percent of those pursue a college degree, and only about half finish a two- or four-year degree. So the talent pool each year is made up of some 40 percent of those graduating—that’s 16,000—plus half of those deciding not to pursue a college degree—another 12,000 people on average. That comes to about 28,000 Youth job candidates each year.” And when you add college students to that tally, we obviously have a deep bench of youth candidates to draw from each year.
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THIS MONTH, WE at Apprenticely, teamed up with the Urban Institute and submitted a proposal to the American Student Assistance Program, who is distributing grant funding for Youth Apprenticeships. Arkansas is one of just a handful of states that’s been asked to apply. The grant may begin in the fall, which is right around the corner.
The starting point for us as an ecosystem here in Arkansas is that we have employers who have already invested in school systems through their sponsorship of industry-focused “academies.” That’s happened in urban areas like Little Rock with Arkansas Children’s Hospital and Sylvan Hills. It’s happened in rural communities where relationships with school systems have been established by either a manufacturer or a healthcare organization, though not so much in IT. Clearly the idea has been to establish some sort of curriculum and process that would expose this younger generation to the techniques and work-related activities of the employers’ particular industry. But while they could demonstrate workforce examples and maybe allow some career job shadowing and mentoring, there’s been no formal process by which a student could actually be hired by that employer. Now we have the vehicle for that to happen through Youth Apprenticeships. And this is where we’ll start building our network, with organizations that have already established these school relationships.
I was in Northwest Arkansas last week and went out to Siloam Springs to call on Gates Rubber, a subsidiary of Gates Corporation. Working with their local high school, they’ve sponsored an academy focused on technology advancement in their manufacturing process, and they believe that some of the curriculum they’ve helped build for that high school lends itself to a couple of apprenticeship roles for some of their internal candidates, as well some they might bring on from outside. They want to maximize the impact of their hiring process because they’re in a rural community where there aren’t that many candidates. So, they have high hopes for this Youth Apprenticeship platform in terms of those academy students who’re already invested in that curriculum.
Their goal is to tap into that local high school population and catch them before they wander off to wherever. Many of those students aren’t thinking about going to college, and Gates has a couple of different levels for apprentices. One is in introductory industrial maintenance, which prepares the participants to learn all about the equipment and how to keep it running smoothly.
But these local high school students are coming in already equipped by this company-sponsored curriculum that has taught them many of the basics. So, a youth apprenticeship trajectory for them looks like this: start the apprenticeship while they finish high school; graduate and remain a youth apprentice until they finish that length of time as industrial maintenance, which might take them an extra six months or a year; then get promoted either into a regular apprenticeship, or just promoted to the company’s next level. And all the while they’ll have been paid to learn.
Another hot spot for our Youth Apprenticeship network is Springdale, where various employers are already engaged with the Springdale Public Schools. Some of the employer categories are trades and construction, which doesn’t apply to us. But now they’re moving into maintenance, they’re moving into IT, they want to start a healthcare curriculum, whether that’s medical coding or a medical assistant kind of Youth Apprenticeship. This looks like a very promising area for us.
Which brings me back to baseball. Unlike the NFL, which only recruits from college players, baseball’s draft picks in the first round are probably 50/50 high schoolers and college players. After that, for the next three or four rounds, it’s almost all seasoned four-year college players who excelled in NCAA Division I baseball because they’ve had better competition, they’ve been seasoned, they’re already a more proven product than a high school kid who might’ve hit .600 and won 17 games against his local friends, none of whom are going to play ball in the future.
So, for employers in every corner of this state, our Youth Apprenticeship concept allows them to identify—very early—stellar candidates that they would love to hire. And even if those young people are planning to continue their education, this scenario gives the employer a way to not lose them to school or life in general, never to come back again. It’s the same reason pro baseball teams draft a high school phenom. They want them first, and they have a strong reason to believe this young person is going to develop into a standout member of the team.
As for the students themselves, whether they’re going for a college degree or not, Youth Apprenticeships provide a level of reliable structure and financial security during a period of life that can be unpredictable. If they’re working toward a degree, this gives us a way to identify them sooner and not just give them a temporary summer internship, but actually hire them as a youth apprentice, which means they’re really considered a full-time employee on the payroll of their employer, even though they’re only showing up at work a fraction of the time.
Because of our age span from 18 to 24, this doesn’t eliminate community-college or four-year-degree students. We’ll be working with the University of Arkansas and a whole host of schools in the state’s community college system. As long as they’re a full-time enrolled student and they meet the age requirement, they’re eligible for—well, the Workforce Draft. And they’ll be on their way to becoming well-paid pros on the team of their choice.
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Lonnie Emard is Apprenticely’s National Apprenticeship Director.