Registered Apprenticeship needs to be better. Let's start here.

Changing the conversation on how to remake America's most talked-about (and complained-about) workforce program.

The issue

We need to do Registered Apprenticeship better. We have to scrape a lot of crap off of it to get there, but we can.

Explain.

It’s really hard to capture what needs to happen with Registered Apprenticeship and why in one big digestible lump. I know because I have been trying for six months. But after all that, I think I have a tidy thought for how to capture how to make Registered Apprenticeship better—and a starting point for how to make the multitude of changes it will take to strengthen this form of getting people into good jobs that need filling.

Understanding it, however, does require an expedition through all the winding roads of crap Registered Apprenticeship has picked up over the last few decades, the costs of it, and why we need Registered Apprenticeship to work a little better than it does now, even with some underreported successes.

For the uninitiated, Registered Apprenticeship is a voluntary system by which the federal government blesses an apprenticeship program as being of better quality. Congress created the current system in the 1930s as a way of promoting programs that actually train people better.

Apprenticeship programs tend to make the most theoretical sense of any workforce program because workers can support themselves while doing the job and learning how to get better at it to get paid more. In theory, a federally blessed version of apprenticeship should get benefits that encourages employers to join up and create more opportunities for workers to get better jobs. Also in theory, having more programs would encourage better workforce training and better employment opportunities through those quality controls.

That’s the idea in theory. In reality, it’s not an easy program to get into for employers or workers and too frequently not for justifiable reasons. For workers, Registered Apprenticeships can pay well on the backend, but federal rules allow their pay to start as low as the minimum wage. It also can be harder for certain workers—women especially—to get into better-paying registered programs, and it can be kind of hard for workers to know the option to apprentice is available to them at all.

Women are the canaries for what's missing in apprenticeship.

Registered Apprenticeship’s core regulations also are a complicated mess¹ that’s enforced inconsistently due to confusing language. Sometimes good programs get held up on the way in technical language that just doesn’t hit a regulator’s brainpan the right way and they read things into the law that just aren’t there.

It also can be very hard for employers and third-party operators of programs to know where they need to go to get registered. As a consequence of state registration preceding federal registration, there is a half-and-half split of states where the U.S. Department of Labor handles registrations and states where DOL has deputized State Apprenticeship Agencies handle the most of them. That also means DOL has double regulation responsibilities with very limited resources, ones made worse by stringent Bush-era rules for deputized states that created more problems through their messy underlying politics.² This means DOL’s very, very limited staff has to enforce rules that are too complicated for their own good while also trying to make sure deputized states have commas in the right places in their laws.

The benefits of registration also are not there for employers or workers. Congress appropriates so little for Registered Apprenticeship and spreads it in so many directions that only 3 percent of apprentices see any of it. If you do the math, that’s not likely to get appreciably better if the Trump Administration sees through its workforce plans. That’s very little help for employers to get their apprenticeship up and running and very little help for workers who need short-term assistance with working their way up from a low-wage stage of an apprenticeship program.

If all that feels confusing and messy and hard to follow… yes, it is. Unfortunately, it’s muddled even more by a stilted political conversation that either makes Registered Apprenticeship the ultimate solution for all employment issues or a giant curse on America and its workforce. There also are Registered Apprenticeship advocates who would prefer things that stay complicated even it costs us—and them—good programs to gatekeep out the bad ones. Relatedly, Registered Apprenticeship also gets bound up in anti-union sentiment—to understate the hell out of it—due to unions spending more than a century working to be leaders in Registered Apprenticeship and workforce training, something that has been said to be an unfair advantage by union opponents and competing programs.³

There also is no shortage of Very Urgent Thinktank Reports Saying That Registered Apprenticeship Isn’t Producing the 3 Trillion Workers We Need in X Job by Three Seconds from Now. That’s a flawed premise for a quality control program—which by definition doesn’t let everybody in. It’s also one that overlooks that, by the numbers, Registered Apprenticeship has had a tremendous decade. Yes, the complications and barriers are all there, but the energy put into registering programs has resulted in a near doubling of the total number of apprentices in a 10-year period. That’s huge.

That growth gets overlooked, though, because all the crap above means we’re experiencing a period of Apprenticeship Exhaustion. Many employers—and even worker advocates and workforce thinkers—are wondering aloud if apprenticeship is even worth it after two decades of urgency and apprenticeship often being offered as the answer to every question—without enough payoff to justify all that energy and angst. This despite billions the Biden Administration invested in Registered Apprenticeship⁴ and the Trump Administration’s commitment to reaching 1 million active apprentices.⁵

Should we just build the whole boat out of apprenticeship?

The thing is that apprenticeship still makes the most theoretical sense of the workforce options on the table, especially with the impending financial strangulation of traditional college and the loss of existing jobs due to hyperadoption of AI. You need some sort of model version of apprenticeship to point toward because apprenticeship tempts shortcuts and attracts scammers, just like it did in the 1930s. The federal government is in the best place to set the pieces of that model for the country, if only to have a common touchpoint for employers who spread over multiple states.

Scraping all the crap off and refocusing around a slimmer and cleaner set of ideas is what we need most. It’s also the thing that we can control right now because I know few, if any, people hopeful that the second Trump Administration is going to do anything on apprenticeship that’s thoughtful or forward-looking. Even Republicans.⁶

So what do we do about it?

I have helped build at least parts of two apprenticeship rules everyone hated—and in two very different administrations. Where those rules fell apart, I think, is clarity of purpose. The point of fixing Registered Apprenticeship can’t be to fix everything in workforce and the world around it. It has to focus on fixing Registered Apprenticeship on its own terms—what it is and what it can be.⁷

So let’s focus on the basics:

• Registered Apprenticeship is meant to be a marker of quality in training and employment so workers (and employers using a third-party program operator) know where to shop.

• “Quality” means quality, not complicated procedure. Complicated procedure just annoys people and makes it harder for an underfunded government agencies to enforce quality. Quality—real quality—actually scares off the bad actors the complicated procedure is supposed to ward off because bad actors ain’t here for quality.

• Theoretically all this is supposed to come with benefits.

Or to put it another way:

We need to make it easier to register apprenticeship programs so we can raise the expectations for the quality of programs that get registered.

That sentence would take another five newsletters to fully unpack, as you’ll see from my newsletters through the end of the year. But I do think there are a few big ideas we can sketch out in what that looks like:

• Registered Apprenticeships shouldn’t be paying anything less than a living wage, not a minimum wage, and they should be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.⁸ You can’t say Registered Apprenticeship is a guarantee of quality—which political leaders do a lot—and hide the opportunities or ask people to muddle through until they’ve starved their way there.⁹

• It shouldn’t take more than 30 days to make a decision on whether most apprenticeship programs are qualified to operate as a Registered Apprenticeship. DOL should have a hyper-standardized menu of options for fulfilling each of its requirements to speed along programs. If a program can’t come in at the start, that’s fine: I’d rather they launch and figure out how to meet the requirements rather than spend extensive resources coaching a multitude of new programs into existence instead of monitoring and ensuring quality.

• That might mean that Registered Apprenticeship is not going to be able to recruit every employer ever into Registered Apprenticeship. That’s OK. I would rather have a few good employers in one industry in the program than water down the standards to bring in a lot of mediocre ones. The growth numbers are good and there are signs they’re getting better.

The missing piece, of course, are incentives. Ideally, DOL should be able to require that deputized states—in exchange for a more streamlined approval process—offer at least one incentive to encourage registration in their state. Many states already would meet this standard through things like tax credits. Codifying it as an expectation, not a lovely occurrence, would make it so we didn’t have to rely on Congress to put its money where its mouth is on apprenticeship funding. Which it seems unlikely to do anytime soon.

The Unfunded Mandates Reform Act makes that especially tricky, though. If Congress wants to maintain its usual tightfistedness on workforce but actually grow apprenticeship, it should pass a limited exception to this law to allow official blessing and expansion of things states already are doing.

Continuing the conversation.

This is a complicated topic, and as I noted above, this won’t be the last time I write about reforming apprenticeship as I work on building out a fuller policy framework for how we should rethink Registered Apprenticeship. This also is an area where I want to build a real set of solutions for any interested policymaker as I expand this newsletter’s collection of resources.

So today I really, really want to hear what you think below. What did I miss? How wrong am I? Can the wrongness be made up by wearing a funny hat? All these are valid inputs. Because apprenticeship can be a politically touchy topic—especially when funny hats are involved—you also can email me directly at nick@jobsthat.work.

I’ll also be pulling out topics for feedback in exclusive paid subscriber chats, as well as some extra exclusive for my Founding Readers tier of subscribers.

1. This provision, meant to prevent employers from starting programs as an endaround their unions, felt like a neurological event the first time I read it as a trained attorney:

(j) Under a program proposed for registration by an employer or employers' association, where the standards, collective bargaining agreement or other instrument provides for participation by a union in any manner in the operation of the substantive matters of the apprenticeship program, and such participation is exercised, written acknowledgement of union agreement or no objection to the registration is required. Where no such participation is evidenced and practiced, the employer or employers' association must simultaneously furnish to an existing union, which is the collective bargaining agent of the employees to be trained, a copy of its application for registration and of the apprenticeship program. The Registration Agency must provide for receipt of union comments, if any, within 45 days before final action on the application for registration and/or approval.

2. I have tried to explain this situation a few times in a tidy way, but I think it merits its own newsletter. To give you the thumbnail, however: in some states, apprenticeship decisions are handled by appointed State Apprenticeship Councils that can be staffed up with union allies and have all sorts of procedural levers for holding up programs that they think undermine union programs. The 2008 Bush rules required more lockstep requirements for State Apprenticeship Agencies to try to depower these councils. Basically, a state has to strictly comply with all the rules of Registered Apprenticeship in their own laws, something the Bush Administration didn’t really leave a blueprint behind for how to do. The end result, however, has been that these councils still exist and DOL spends a lot of time debating states over word choices inserted by some random legislator—because, well, that’s the standard.

For what it’s worth, I’ve ultimately become agnostic on the councils so long as programs that deserve to get registered get registered. Because DOL doesn’t have congressional authority to delegate all Registered Apprenticeship decisions to states—also something that needs its own unpacking in a separate newsletter—it holds ultimate authority over registering programs. Meaning if your program can’t get registered at the state level, it can always go to DOL. This rarely happens because, to be very technical about it, 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️😔.

3. In the process of researching this piece I read what I can only describe as a “regulatory self-own.” In 2008, in responding to comments on the current regulatory heart of Registered Apprenticeship, the Department of Labor noted that multiple commenters opposed a requirement nudging programs to better ensure apprentices completed their training.
Why? Because the “proposed requirement would favor union-operated programs[.]” In other words: “The unions have an unfair advantage because they’re too good at getting people trained.”

I haven’t gone back to look at all of the individual comments, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that they noted that they make a terrible roux and their piano playing will make you question the necessity of sound in the human experience.

4. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think the Biden efforts were hamstrung by the problems in getting programs registered that I mention above.

5. Which no one I have talked to thinks will be reached through an honest and fair accounting of the number of apprentices actually in Registered Apprenticeship. That should worry the Trump Administration considering how much it has staked on jobs and apprenticeship in general.

6. Which also should worry the Trump Administration. I have heard some awfully conservative folks struggle to see the Administration’s vision in light of its proposed funding megacuts, among several other issues.

7. Trump I, of course, tried to bypass this by inventing a new version of apprenticeship regulation. If you look closely at its final rule, though, you’ll see it just put out Registered Apprenticeship: Pitch Black.

Apprenticeship looks like apprenticeship, folks. As much as some members of Congress ask for “relief” from its structures, the basic protections—train people for real, keep them safe, pay them well what they deserve—aren’t going anywhere and won’t fit employers who don’t want to do them.

8. In 2023, DOL’s (now-dissolved) advisory committee of apprenticeship experts recommended that all Registered Apprenticeship programs offer living wages—by a two-to-one margin.

9. Circling back to an earlier point: in the trades—a big focus of the current political conversation around workforce—this doesn’t look like a terribly hard standard to reach, based on my quick scan of entry-level apprenticeship opportunities in multiple states. And yes, the vast majority of these appeared to be union jobs.