The US DOL Wants States To Expand Apprenticeships. Will, and Can, Community Colleges Support Truly Employer-Focused Apprenticeships?

Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting

In an article entitled, “A New Breed of Apprenticeships,” several community colleges were celebrated for their vision in expanding apprenticeship programs to non-traditional areas, in this case healthcare.

In reviewing the article’s “Five Key Elements” of an employer-based apprenticeship, I wonder if the understanding exists of what is most important to the employer. Something that isn’t “front-and-center” as an element is the need to ensure that the apprenticeship program, at a minimum, results in a worker who has mastered all of the tasks for the apprenticeship employer host’s job classification. Without that assurance, the employer will be underwhelmed, if not disappointed, and may disband the program; leaving current apprentices without a program to finish and those who targeted the program without the special status they were expecting.

The article’s author rightly pointed out that apprenticeships have been around for around 4,000 years. They were built around the job classification in the beginning because that is all that there was. There were no community colleges for core and industry-general skill development; just a subject matter expert transferring expertise to a fresh recruit. It was effective because training was one-on-one in relatively low- traffic work environments. Expertise, tribal knowledge, work wisdom and known safety rules were all transferred while transferring each task’s best practice, so there was no doubt how these components fit together.

This approach became more difficult to manage as enterprises grew in size, scope and complexity. For profit-motivated employers, a 10 or 15 year apprenticeship was unthinkable. Labor unions tried to focus training more into an 8 or 9 year apprenticeship, but it was still hard to administrate and non-union shops showed no interest at all.

In general, employers drifted further and further from the concept of expert-to-novice expertise transfer, opting instead for the very informal, unstructured and occasional one-on-one training prevalent in most firms. Never mind the obvious contradiction with other contemporary management strategies such as LEAN, Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement that are applied to capital investments. Most employers seemed to settle on the “hope for the best” strategy when it came to human assets, hoping further that the local educational institutions would come up with a solution while they raced forward to be competitive – dragging this anchor behind them.

In the 1980’s, the warning was sounded of the approaching convergence of societal trends that would significantly impact the availability and quality of skilled labor. Today, we are talking about it as if nothing tried worked – offering up similar versions of failed solutions. It is as if there is very little institutional memory to help focus each generation’s effort to modernize what worked in the past, which brings us back to the root point of an apprenticeship: using one expert to replicate another expert in the work at hand. It is not enough to call a program an apprenticeship that results in a trainee graduating with mastered core and industry-general skills, with no evidence of applying these skills in the mastering of tasks required of a grateful employer. If this is left out, these new programs are nothing more than 2 or 3 year versions of an associate’s degree or vocational certificate. 

An apprenticeship must be built from the target job classification out, not based on what school programs are available. That is why an employer’s involvement is important. But they will not participate, invest resources and stay engaged unless they see clearly that the program will result in more experts for the work they need done and witness that outcome. Most of the community college-based apprenticeship projects I led were structured exactly this way, and it was not difficult at all to attract additional employers into a regional effort.

Everyone still had their role: partner high schools, career centers, training providers and community and technical colleges used the data collected to set-up the structured, task-based on-the-job training to screen candidates and select, develop and improve core and industry-general skill development programs; workforce development agencies provided financial resources as “seed money” to prove the concept to employers to mitigate any perceived risk; workforce agencies provided case management support to ensure the most vulnerable could complete the program given all of the distractions that threatened them. And even when economic catastrophes occurred, sweeping management changes displaced employer allies or policy changes lead to the loss of local institutional allies, the structured on-the-job training programs established survived and were ready to update and resume.

Proactive Technologies, Inc. has been a proven resource in:

• defining the job classification through a thorough job/task and safety analysis;
• sharing the data with the other stakeholders;
• building the employer’s infrastructure for the structured on-the-job training;
• providing project technical implementation support for the employer so they can focus on business;
• providing the documentation of training progress and reporting to manage and improve the outcome;
• and managing the data and program for the many changes it will encounter to keep the program always current, accurate and content valid.

In addition, the approach used to set-up the structured on-the-job training provides many benefits appreciated by employers such as:

• “expertise capture” and documented “process-driven training” for compliance with ISO9001:2015 and similar requirements of IATF and AS, and standards for food and pharmaceutical industries;
• Technical Procedure manuals for job-performance aids for each job classification for those employers that wish they had them;
• Documentation and metrics to measure and report project performance, and to facilitate process improvement such as LEAN;
• Job Descriptions, job-specific Performance Appraisal Forms and Written Exams/Answer Sets;
• a lot more.

This adds even more reasons as to why employers want to remain engaged in an apprenticeship.

What’s more, the structured on-the-job training infrastructure is not only for new-hires. It is also used to document past task mastery of incumbent workers and focus the effort to close each person’s training gap. The accelerated transfer of expertise^TM drives new-hires and incumbents, both, to full job mastery – the very definition of an apprenticeship.

To learn more about this hybrid model of workforce development, contact K & D Consulting or Proactive Technologies representative. Sign up to attend one of Proactive Technologies’ scheduled GoToMeeting presentations (to your computer) or setup one that fits your schedule. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. A 13-minute promo briefing is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff.