Strategies

• 1. Align Programs and Funding to Promote Inclusivity

  Summary

  Many companies, especially those in traditional industries, need better strategies for cultivating and recruiting their next generation of talent. In manufacturing, for example, eight in 10 workers are white, seven in 10 are men, and one in four is 55 or older. At the same time, the widescale adoption of automated equipment and robotic systems across the industry is increasing the need for workers with new skills, sometimes for entirely new jobs. Combined with a renewed interest among federal and state policymakers in domestic manufacturing in the wake of the pandemic and 12 straight months of recovery-led growth in the industry, it appears as though the demand for new manufacturing talent will extend far into the future, creating career opportunities for a new and more diverse generation of workers.  

  For manufacturing companies and others, apprenticeship offers a way forward in a tight labor market and an opportunity for companies to grow their own talent. But apprenticeship programs could perpetuate existing inequities if they don’t adopt inclusive design practices. Fortunately, individual employers don’t have to build apprenticeships alone. By working with existing programs and taking advantage of existing resources and community assets, they can design supportive pathways into inclusive apprenticeships that lead to good jobs and rewarding careers for young people of all backgrounds.

   

  Strategy in Action 

  Shenandoah Valley Workforce Development Board (Virginia)

  The Shenandoah Valley Workforce Development Board is a nonprofit organization that partners with state and local agencies and organizations to provide employment, training, and workforce development services (including WIOA-funded programs) to employers and youth and adults in a 10-county region in western Virginia.

  In 2018, Shenandoah Valley Workforce Development Board partnered with Hershey Chocolate of Virginia to connect young people looking for good jobs and careers to opportunities in maintenance and manufacturing in the candy company’s plant in Stuart Drafts, Virginia. Hershey understood that manufacturing was not top-of-mind for young people looking for jobs, and the workforce board saw an opportunity to help design an inclusive program that could serve as a pathway to good jobs for a diverse pool of young workers (and adults), including people with disabilities receiving services from the Wilson Workforce and Rehabilitation Center, a partner agency of the workforce board.

  That led to the creation of the Hershey Boot Camp, a two-week paid training program that prepares participants with no previous food manufacturing experience for the company’s Industrial Manufacturing Technician apprenticeship program. In the summer of 2020, despite the pandemic, the boot camp was in its fourth iteration. Program staff had surveyed participants to determine needed accommodations and safety protocols.

  The second time it offered the boot camp, organizers added a Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services coach to the staff, and then built that coaching role into the program design beginning with the third cohort. Coaches provided supportive feedback early in the learning process, ensured that program complied with all relevant regulations, helped boot camp participants navigate the workplace, and connected them to any community supports and services they might need (such as transportation assistance). Program staff noted that the coaches proactively addressed a number of issues before they became problems in the workplace. Coaches continued working with participants for a month after they began working at Hershey to ensure that they made smooth transitions into employment. Some participants also joined Hershey’s own Abilities First program, which aims to promote accessibility and inclusion throughout the company’s operations.

  In mid-2020, the Shenandoah Valley Workforce Development Board created new positions for community resource liaisons, on the theory that ongoing partner engagement would reveal new opportunities to collaborate on creating inclusive apprenticeship programs and accelerating their implementation.

  By the spring of 2021, the Hershey Boot Camp program had become a successful pre-apprenticeship: 25 young people had completed the training and started formal registered apprenticeship programs with the company.

  The Shenandoah Valley Workforce Development Board is employing a similar model for a new Building Maintenance Technician pre-apprenticeship that is starting in Winchester, Virginia. This initiative is part of a sector-based employer partnership, and one of its goals is to use WIOA programs more intentionally.

• 2. Employ People-Centered Support Strategies

  Summary

  Apprenticeships are considered particularly effective in part because they operate as learn-by-doing training models within real-world settings. But this also means they operate within social, environmental, and community contexts that program administrators have no control over (such as the ongoing health care and economic crises and the national reckoning with racial injustice). Circumstances can shift unexpectedly, with significant consequences. To better serve opportunity youth, apprenticeship programs must be resilient and able to respond to unexpected events. Toward that end, they should establish partnerships with education programs and nonprofit and workforce organizations that have experience serving opportunity youth. With those types of connections throughout the community, apprenticeship providers should be better able to respond quickly to unexpected challenges—or even crises—that affect young people, their families and communities, and the companies that employ them.

   

  Strategy in Action

  Café Reconcile, New Orleans

  Reconcile New Orleans is a nonprofit, social enterprise that runs a full-service soul food café – Café Reconcile - event space, and workforce development program. It’s located in New Orleans—a city with one of the largest opportunity youth populations of all major U.S. cities—and is part of FareStart, a network of foodservice and culinary arts social enterprises that provide job training and help people develop entrepreneurship skills in communities across the country. Café Reconcile joined the AEMF opportunity youth apprenticeship effort to pilot apprenticeship as a training model, with the idea that its own training program could support apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeships that lead to Registered Apprenticeships with employer partners. 

  In 2018, Reconcile New Orleans received a grant to support Trauma Informed Care (TIC) training for its program staff. Adhering to the six key principles of a trauma-informed approach outlined by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the curriculum features eight professional development sessions intended to help staff develop the capacity to improve the participant experience and boost programs outcomes. At the time, Reconcile New Orleans program staff hoped to improve youth engagement and find ways to recognize and better support young people dealing with the effects of past or ongoing trauma. 

  Reconcile New Orleans joined two peer organizations (both Catalyst Kitchens members) in participating in the JFF opportunity youth apprenticeship effort.  

   The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on foodservice enterprises like Reconcile New Orleans. And then as the country grappled with a health care crisis and an economic shutdown, the civil unrest that arose in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others further disrupted Reconcile New Orleans’ program activities and had a negative impact on participants’ mental health and well-being. The organization’s leaders soon realized that not just young people but the whole community was experiencing massive trauma. 

  They needed new approaches to help people cope as their lives were being upended by the multiple crises. They chose to double down on trauma informed solutions, making TIC training mandatory for everyone in the organization and offering it more broadly to alumni, employer partners, and community members. Together with complementary tools and training—Reframing Conflict Training from the Center on Youth Program Quality and Mental Health First Aid USA training for adults assisting young people—the Café helped staff develop the confidence to respond to complex needs under extremely difficult circumstances.  

   Internally, because of the training, Reconcile New Orleans program staff have become a stronger team and they have developed new processes and communication protocols to signal their needs and those of program participants without imposing additional trauma. They have also found alternative paths to learning that make programs more accessible to young people from all backgrounds. For example, Reconcile New Orleans now invites young people to share their ideas about program design and governance.  

   Externally, Reconcile New Orleans is putting more thought into its efforts to develop partnerships—a key principle of TIC—to both increase the likelihood of positive experiences for the young people it serves and to contribute meaningfully to recovery in the community. Such partnerships have been especially critical in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Two new employer partners collaborating with Reconcile New Orleans on opportunity youth apprenticeship are locally owned champions of work-based learning that are committed to creating employment opportunities for the young people Reconcile New Orleans serves. Both are willing to start apprentices at pay rates that exceed the federal minimum wage and increase their pay as they learn new skills, with participants’ compensation levels ultimately progressing to a living wage by the time they complete the program. 

• 3. Target Underserved Populations

  Summary

  Inclusive apprenticeship is about ensuring that high-quality apprenticeship opportunities are available to everyone. While apprenticeship providers may assert that their programs are open to all applicants, in practice, significant segments of the population may not be able to access or successfully participate in many programs. U.S. Department of Labor data on apprenticeship participation rates for the government’s 2020 fiscal year indicate that substantial numbers of people of color and women of all backgrounds—demographic groups that overlap with the opportunity youth population—are missing out on the opportunities apprenticeship offers. To address that problem, programs can gather data to identify populations that are missing from their pools of apprenticeship participants and make an effort to target those groups in their recruiting efforts, program design updates, and partnership development.

   While this might sound like a problem with a straightforward solution, there are complex structural reasons for the lack of diversity in apprenticeship. Programs cannot make apprenticeship more inclusive and equitable simply by recruiting one or two participants from populations that are currently underrepresented in their apprenticeship cohorts. Rather, if they want to create opportunities for workers from a wider segment of the population than they currently serve, they can partner with organizations that can introduce apprenticeship to entire demographic groups.

   

  Strategy in Action

  Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County (Washington)

  The Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County (WDC) is a nonprofit, grantmaking organization dedicated to creating career pathways for adults and young people through demand-driven workforce initiatives and training programs. It operates federal WIOA initiatives and other workforce programs and partners with business, labor, education, and community-based organizations to help build and maintain an inclusive and dynamic regional economy.

  The WDC has had a successful long-term partnership with the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee (AJAC), which offers a wide range of inclusive training programs—including apprenticeships, introductory boot camps, and pre-apprenticeships—that prepare workers for jobs and careers in the aerospace manufacturing industry. As a participant in the AEMF project, the WDC hopes to identify ways to extend apprenticeship to opportunity youth because it recognizes that young people in this population can miss out on work-based learning opportunities because they are not enrolled in schools or career and technical programs from which youth apprentices are typically recruited.

  However, the WDC had to revisit its aerospace-focused strategy during the economic shutdown that followed the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Because of pandemic-driven closures and travel restrictions, aerospace industry production slowed dramatically, and Boeing, the state of Washington’s largest aerospace employer, suffered its worst year on record and announced in the fall that it would move production of its 787 Dreamliner aircraft to South Carolina in 2021 to cut costs.

  Those developments led the WDC to aggressively engaging with other industries, including construction, which experienced only a brief slowdown in the spring of 2020 and has since expanded. There are a number of high-quality construction apprenticeships that lead to good jobs, but opportunity youth and women of all ages are vastly underrepresented in the industry’s training programs.

  The WDC was able to connect one of its programs for opportunity youth to a construction pre-apprenticeship that prepares participants for apprenticeships in the trades. The idea was to offer opportunity youth a defined pathway into construction apprenticeships and onward to careers in an industry with solid prospects for long-term growth.

  In a similar vein, WDC formed a partnership with Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Employment for Women (ANEW), an organization for women in construction that provides pre-apprenticeships and career exploration activities linked to 17 employers in the building trades. Again, the idea is to create direct pathways between its own programs for opportunity youth and apprenticeships in an industry with strong growth potential. This initiative is especially promising because construction is experiencing a shortage of workers and would do well to expand its workforce by creating more opportunities for women.

  These types of direct connections—partnerships in which the parties work together instead of just making referrals to one another—can inspire inclusive practices by expanding apprenticeship opportunities to members of groups that typically haven’t had access to high-quality work-based learning programs.