How Apprenticeship Programs for Opportunity Youth Stay Resilient Through the COVID 19 Recession

This report is intended to highlight trends experienced across the Apprenticeship Expansion and Modernization Fund (AEMF) pilot site cohort. It captures the status of those workforce development boards and community-based organizations in the early summer of 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic became a reality in the United States. The report identifies key challenges as well as crisis-driven innovations. It points toward longer-term strategies needed to keep the Registered Apprenticeship system viable and accessible to opportunity youth now, and evolve it into an asset for recovery later. The report first summarizes the context of the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn. It then documents coping strategies and promising practices from among AEMF sites and provides recommendations for promoting resilience in Registered Apprenticeship programs and among opportunity youth participants.

The Workforce Development Boards and nonprofit and community-based organizations managing the AEMF pilots have confronted three primary challenges. The first was the loss of employer hosts for apprentices, as businesses have downsized their own staffs or been hesitant to commit to hosting apprentices in an uncertain economic environment. The second was supporting host firms, classroom training providers, and apprentices themselves as recruiting, onboarding, and training activities moved online. The third was building new partnerships at a time when most partners, including community colleges, industry associations, community organizations, and many employers were fighting for their own survival. Retooling in real-time became the norm for many.

The AEMF pilots have employed a number of strategies in adapting to this new environment, including: 1) providing services remotely; 2) pausing some service delivery; 3) redesigning programs as needed,; 4) diversifying career pathways and focusing on transferability of skills and occupational mobility; 5) using downtime to regroup and plan; and 6) prioritizing equity and access.

(This report is 33 pages long.)

The researchers identified the following findings:

• Opportunity youth run the risk of being further marginalized. The current reliance on online education has exacerbated the digital divide because it favors those who are digitally connected either at home or through their schools.
• Opportunity youth often lack such connectivity and, as a result, face further barriers to reconnecting to educational and career pathways.
• Youth apprenticeships are gaining currency with employers. For employers, the ability to customize training to their most immediate needs and escalate pay based on skills gains and productivity make apprenticeship particularly attractive at a time when work processes are subject to frequent changes, even if some of the training has to be shifted online.
• Four-year college degrees are losing some of their previous competitive advantages, accelerating a trend that preceded the COVID-19 era. The high price of a college education was already prohibitive for many career seekers, including opportunity youth. The fact that pandemic-related social distancing rules are keeping most campuses closed in the fall and forcing most classes to move online further favors apprenticeships.
• The COVID-19 effect favors certain career pathways while disadvantaging others. While some industries were able to expand remote work fairly seamlessly—especially if it was already common before COVID-19—in other industries, the transition was much more difficult or even impossible. This rapid acceleration of moving jobs online also increased the need for a range of IT jobs, in particular in the areas of cloud computing, cybersecurity, and related support occupations, which are needed to support the digitization of work processes.
• Programs have had to pivot in order to remain responsive to the needs of employers. Some are shifting their training from declining industries to adjacent industries or occupations. Others have quickly accelerated their recruiting and onboarding in industries that experienced a surge in demand once shelter-in-place ordinances were lifted in some parts of the country. Some programs have used the COVID-19-imposed pause to engage with their partners in an effort to enhance the apprenticeship ecosystem with new services, partners, and supports, or to boost system capacity to provide young people with articulated pathways.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2020
• Author(s): Wolff, K.; Koller, V.; van Docto, C.
• Funding Source: U.S. Department of Labor
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies