Zach Boren, Senior Policy Program Manager at Urban Institute, on Making Apprenticeship Simpler

Intro

Welcome to another episode of Making Apprenticeship Simpler interviews where we dive deep into the minds of industry experts to uncover valuable insights and knowledge. In today's episode, our hosts Zach Boren discusses the complexities and nuances of apprenticeship programs in the United States.

Zach, a senior policy program manager with the Urban Institute, brings over a decade of experience in the field, having worked extensively with the Office of Apprenticeship in Washington, DC. From simplifying the apprenticeship process for employers to overcoming funding challenges and leveraging intermediaries, Zach shares his vision for modernizing and expanding apprenticeship opportunities. If you've ever been curious about the future of workforce training and how we can build a more robust and accessible system, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in as we explore how to make apprenticeships simpler, more effective, and ultimately, a cornerstone of career development in the modern job market.

Highlights

• Primary Question: How to Make Apprenticeships Simpler?

• Importance of customer support for employers and simplifying the experience of starting a program

• Exploring financial and structural challenges, along with apprenticeship investment around the world

• First Area: Office of Apprenticeship resources and importance of intermediaries

• Apprenticeship.gov and available resources

• Challenges in customer service and program design

• Highlighting the importance of knowledgeable intermediaries

• Providing industry-vetted resources and training

• Second Area: Financial and Structural Challenges

• High cost of starting apprenticeship programs

• Training platform and apprentice instruction, & comparison with university systems

• Lack of widespread recognition for apprenticeships

• Improving funding mechanisms and reducing fragmentation in funding and investment

• Third Area: International Comparisons and Public Investment

• Success of apprenticeship models in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK

• Parallels with higher education spending in the US

• Enhancing federal investment in apprenticeships outside union trades

• Closing Thoughts and Reflections

• Recap on education cost coverage for apprenticeships

• Supporting program management and expanding the role of intermediaries

• Addressing apprenticeship completion rates

Transcript

Patrick Cushing:

Hey, Zach, thank you for joining us for this series. I'd love to get you to introduce yourself, give people some sense of who you are and your background in apprenticeship, and then we can get started.

Zach Boren:

Yeah, perfect. Thanks, Patrick. I'm Zach Boren. I'm a Senior Policy Program Manager with the Urban Institute. I've been working on apprenticeships since 2013. Most of that time has been spent with the Office of the Apprenticeship in Washington, DC. My last position there was the Director of a Registered Apprenticeship and Policy, and I'm excited to have this conversation today. It's been on my mind about how to make apprenticeships simpler.

Zach Boren:

Part of our work at Urban Institute is just doing that, spending a lot of time thinking about how do we modernize it, make it more available, simple for employers to use, simple firm apprentices to participate in. There's a lot to talk about.

Patrick Cushing:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this could go on for a very long time, especially your background. But let's start with the one question. Zach, if you could make apprenticeships simpler, what's the number one thing you would focus on?

Zach Boren:

I think the number one thing I would focus on is the customer support for employers that want to start apprenticeships. There's a lot of interest and buzz about apprenticeships, but for decades, apprenticeship was kind of a person to person interaction with either a state director or an apprenticeship rep. You might have heard it by happenstance that you could have an apprenticeship program in the US. I think because of its kind of lack of recognition as a way of learning a career in the United States, it's undervalued and the customer service is not really been fully realized in a way that an organization can find itself into apprenticeships. Simplifying the experience of starting a program is really important. Some of that work we've started to do and done some thinking about, the Office of Apprenticeship over the last ten years has been doing a lot of work to make it simpler. And they've made some big leaps in doing that.

Zach Boren:

You can see that on apprenticeship.gov, everything from finding out what apprenticeships are even out there that I could do. What are the apprenticeships that are currently available that are accepting new hires? That's still a work in progress. How do I start a program? I think the standards builder is a good start. It's not everything yet, and I think there needs to be a lot more work to be done to make that more customer friendly. In my view, customer service requires someone who's really knowledgeable about how to organize an apprenticeship. And that really starts with the design of a program. And if you really want to break it down, it's how do you want apprentices to learn on the job? What do you want them to do very well? And then what can they learn in the classroom to learn that very well, along with a mentor? And so I think for a long time, employers and the way sold apprenticeship has been very challenging. It's been very regulatory, and we haven't had until 2016 intermediaries out, actually, with the idea of selling apprenticeships.

Zach Boren:

I think that's really the best way to go about doing that work, is to be able to design a program, sell it to an employer, organize it, and then quickly register it. We find, at least in the work that I do, we find a lot of employers or organizations that want to start an apprenticeship program but get frustrated along the way. You know, how long is this going to take for the program to be approved? Are the needs that I have in terms of talent that I want to hire, are they relatable to what the apprenticeship system offers? Sometimes the answers to that are yes, and it's a very straightforward answer. When we were doing apprenticeships as an intermediary in the tech apprenticeship project, I think the two simple things that we did were we gave them off the shelf resources. Here's how you would train on the job. It's been vetted by industry. You can bring in your own related instruction. We've added to that in some of the work that we've done north and South Carolina by bringing them the Google certificates.

Zach Boren:

We're going to take care of your on the job training, we're going to take care of your related instruction, and we'll take care of the paperwork. I think the intermediaries are really, really important. I don't think all intermediaries are created equal, though. There are some that are just getting started and they are learning the rules of the road to apprenticeship. It takes time for a system like that to grow and to build upon itself. And in that, there has to be a real technical understanding among the intermediaries on how to design, deploy, sell apprenticeships and to do that well. There are a number of resources that I think have gotten us there. I mentioned apprenticeship.gov.

Zach Boren:

Some of the tech platforms, like standards builder, like having intermediaries that are knowledgeable in the industry and can support a company if they're technically savvy and know how to sell apprenticeships that can help us make apprenticeship simpler. But the challenge is that today making apprenticeship simpler is also very costly. The cost of starting an apprenticeship program for an employer is expensive. You have to think about the startup costs, what is it going to take to have a training platform? What am I going to teach the apprentices? How am I going to take employers off of their productive work every day that I need them to do, and for them to impart what they know to a young apprentice and then paying for it all. The challenge for government at this moment is to figure out how do we bring parity in between what we invest in. Education. Higher education has been made pretty simple. You go to university, there are very bright people there who are going to impart their knowledge to a bright young individual who wants to pursue a career.

Zach Boren:

They will be awarded a degree that can then be recognized by employers everywhere. I don't think we have that type of parity within the apprenticeship system, and not all apprenticeships are really created equal. We see a lot of employers who start up programs, they have trouble kind of getting it going because they don't have that deep knowledge on how to train an employee. It's not built into their DNA just yet. They're built into their DNA is how do we make a widget, how do we turn a profit? And who can I hire that can help us do that? Not necessarily who we can train to be able to do that job, that we need that apprentice. It's challenging for employers to really grasp what we need to do or what they would do in deploying an apprentice. Again, Office of the Apprenticeship is making some important investments. I see the way that they've invested in the Apprenticeship Academy by putting videos online, making that knowledge and that ability to learn how to deploy an apprenticeship program more simple.

Zach Boren:

In a lot of ways, it seems like the system's still chipping at it, but it's still largely underfunded. The cost of an apprenticeship program is largely, still borne by the employer. Now, one can argue that the trades or the joint labor management programs have really perfected that. They've been able to perfect a couple ways of having employers, signatory contractors and the workers both invest in the next generation. It's important to grasp that that has a system that really works and invest 2 billion a year into union based apprenticeships. We've not yet figured out how to take that model, that joint labor management program model and related to a system, a workforce system that we have in the United States that's largely non union. And I think that's a challenge on making the system more simple. We don't have that funding mechanism yet that allows easily for programs to sprout up, learn from others, and train and deploy the next generation of workers that need to fulfill job.

Zach Boren:

And even within the unions, we see that it's mostly that the construction, the construction crafts have figured that model out, whether it's among the other AFL CIO members, there's very, very few that have also started an apprenticeship program. We see that the vast majority of apprentices today are still in construction. We've not yet figured out this funding model that will allow for the next generation to learn even within the union, even within the union shop. Taking that model, what we've learned from construction over decades and decades may not necessarily work for a non union shop. And I think that's where federal investment needs to be further applied. You compare what Germany, Switzerland, the UK all spend, they all spend in the billions of dollars in their apprenticeship system. We spend on par that in our higher education system, but we've not yet got there on the apprenticeship system. Going forward, for policymakers to really think about if we want to have a robust apprenticeship system that works well outside of the union construction trades, what are the types of smart investments that need to be made to make it easier for employers to start up their program? Know that they're being co invested by the government or the states, and that the full cost of that model can be supported through intermediaries, can be supported through funds for education, can be supported by peer to peer learning.

Zach Boren:

I think those are a lot of the pieces that were right now missing because public investment is so low.

Patrick Cushing:

I love the focus on making it simpler to start up better support, better financing. I think being able to start more programs, even if they all don't make it, means apprenticeship becomes more ubiquitous, means more people know about it, creates a flywheel. If you had a magic wand, if funding was no issue, how do you think you would tackle and kind of create the ideal state? Do you think you get you there?

Zach Boren:

I think you first have to take care of the education for apprenticeships. When we look across at international models that have worked over decades, they all pay for the instruction that apprentices receive. If that's free and that's available, and it's available in whatever occupation you're selecting, let's say it's paid for through community colleges or it's paid for through an online platform, or maybe a multitude of options for employers, which there probably should be multiple options. I would take care of the cost of that first, because that burden weighs on employers minds when they think about paying for the cost of an apprenticeship program. Moreover, I think the cost of the infrastructure to be able to maintain an apprenticeship program is really important, too. What you all have done at WorkHands is really critical. You've sort of made a technology platform that one can use where you need to talk to apprentices, mentors, administrators, and understand where the learning is going. So you can track that and make that a lot easier.

Zach Boren:

That is a challenge. It's an unpaid for in the system. Taking care of the education, taking care of the management of that day to day program, if we're still investing in intermediaries and maybe a lot more of them, or a lot more robustly, I think we can make apprenticeships more simple. The challenge, though, with the intermediary system is that those intermediaries, once they set up the program and it's up and going by the employer and it's registered, those intermediaries go into the distance and they're going after the new clients. The whole system is focused in on start? Not necessarily. How do we maintain a high quality system over time, which shows in completion rates? Completion rates are still below 50% and we've not yet cracked the nut on how do we get, if we're doing all these big starts of new apprenticeship programs, we have hundreds of thousands of new starts of apprentices, but then half of the system gets left in the dustbin because we didn't figure out how to maintain for costs, for questions that remain unresolved, or the technical assistance that a program really needs over the lifetime, then I think we'll continue to have challenge, really getting to the scale that we want.

Patrick Cushing:

That was fantastic. Many places we can remove friction in the process to make apprenticeship simpler. Thank you for lending us your thoughts on this and I'll let you go.

Zach Boren:

You're welcome. Thanks, Patrick.

Patrick Cushing:

See you.

Zach Boren:

See ya.