How policymakers can use apprenticeships to develop talent and ensure workforce diversity

In September, the Biden administration announced a coordinated effort to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Registered Apprenticeships and expand the system to serve 1 million apprentices each year. In announcing its ambitious goal, the White House described apprenticeship as a “high-quality, debt-free, equitable ‘earn and learn’ model” that can help employers hire a more demographically diverse workforce.

Apprenticeships hold the potential to help a diverse range of workers gain the skills and connections they need for finding well-paid jobs within high-demand industries flush with opportunities for career advancement. Workers who complete Registered Apprenticeships earn an average starting salary of $77,000. Unfortunately, there remain significant disparities in who has access to these programs. A recent JFF analysis found that just 8 percent of youths in Registered Apprenticeship programs are Black. Although women make up nearly half of the U.S. labor force, they account for just 13 percent of new apprentices. 

The inclusive promise of Registered Apprenticeships has been hindered by a piecemeal approach to engaging with and encouraging employers to prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in their programs. A growing number of individual companies are pledging to use their Registered Apprenticeships programs as a tool for supporting DEIA in the workforce. But we can’t build an equitable apprenticeship system one company at a time. Indeed, this retail-like approach is not going to create the system-level transformation needed any time soon. Instead, policymakers must craft policies that mobilize employers to change their practices and support them in making these necessary changes. 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion should be baseline expectations for Registered Apprenticeships. 

The federal government is already making equity more of an explicit requirement in exchange for the millions of federal dollars disbursed each year to support apprenticeships. For instance, 70 percent of participants served through the American Apprenticeship Initiative, a recent $175 million federal grant program, are from populations underrepresented in Registered Apprenticeships. Creating lasting change, however, will require not only grants but greater investments and new policies across all levels of government. 

One key lever for impact is through local, state, and federal procurement—the process through which governments tie their purchase of goods and services to specific terms and conditions, including hiring and employment practices. Federal procurement alone accounted for $665 billion in 2020, while state, local, and education procurement account for another $1.5 trillion per year. The Biden administration has touted the potential equity impact of these contracts, arguing in an issue brief that, given the vast purchasing power of the federal government, improving representation in procurement practices can have a notable influence on closing the racial wealth gap. 

Consider the growing popularity of Community Workforce Agreements (CWA) in public sector contracting. These legally-binding agreements can include certain stipulations around hiring and employment, such as the number of local workers that must be hired for a given project. Increasingly these agreements include provisions related to the diversity of the project’s workforce, including its apprenticeship programs. Building equity-focused apprenticeship programs into these contracts is helping advance the careers of workers historically underrepresented in construction. Policymakers can leverage procurement to help more industries, like IT and cybersecurity, scale up their use of Registered Apprenticeships as both a talent development and diversity tool.

Additionally, policymakers could require or incentivize fair chance hiring practices to include Registered Apprenticeships, further opening opportunities to those with conviction and arrest records, a group that disproportionately consists of Black and Latinx individuals. By removing questions about arrests and convictions from the earliest stages of hiring, fair chance hiring policies have been shown to reduce barriers to employment. Integrating “ban-the-box” and other fair chance provisions into the Registered Apprenticeship system could have a similar impact.

It’s also critical that policymakers ensure that the jobs which follow apprenticeships provide fair and sustainable wages. The $40 billion early childhood education market, for example, is now expanding its use of Registered Apprenticeships to help combat a national shortage of educators. However, the median annual wage of early childhood educators is under $25,000, roughly half that of their primary and secondary peers. Any expansion of Registered Apprenticeships in fields like this, that feature notably low wages, should be paired with policy improvements to improve how wage reimbursement rates are set.

These are just a handful of the steps policymakers can take as interest in Registered Apprenticeships programs continues to grow. Policymakers have the power to ensure Registered Apprenticeships become the gold standard—not only for talent development but for workforce diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Deborah Kobes is vice president for Jobs For the Future’s (JFF) Center for Apprenticeship & Work-Based Learning.