Job Training & Apprenticeships

Most policy makers agree that workforce training is essential to America’s competitiveness. Job training is especially important for workers without a college education, for whom it is often the key to a better job or any job at all.

Apprenticeship and other models that integrate classroom and workplace learning are more effective than years of classroom education followed by work without structured support for learning. But apprenticeships remain infrequently used in the United States—a reality that hasn’t changed despite three decades of policymakers’ professed affection for the model.

Publications

Publication

Equity in Apprenticeship: Manufacturing Pathways in Milwaukee: Bringing Skills and Equity to Manufacturing’s Future

Equity in Apprenticeship is a report series from COWS at UW-Madison. It highlights programs that use apprenticeship to extend occupational opportunity to historically marginalized groups, especially people of color and women.

The Industrial Manufacturing Technician (IMT) program is the product of collaboration between labor and management leaders in Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector and has created a new rung in the ladder in production jobs.

Equity in Apprenticeship was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We are grateful for their generous support. The findings and conclusions presented in this series are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Equity in Apprenticeship: Health Care Pathways in LA: New Apprenticeship Opportunities as an Industry Changes

Equity in Apprenticeship is a report series from COWS at UW-Madison. It highlights programs that use apprenticeship to extend occupational opportunity to historically marginalized groups, especially people of color and women.

The Worker Education and Resource Center (WERC) in Los Angeles has become highly adept at preparing health care workers who share a cultural affinity with LA’s patient populations.

Equity in Apprenticeship was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We are grateful for their generous support. The findings and conclusions presented in this series are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Workforce Development in Kentucky Should Encourage High-Road Jobs

Kentucky’s workforce development conversations focus almost exclusively on employers’ needs and perspectives and ask how public dollars can improve perceived deficiencies in the workforce. Such an approach ignores the increasingly difficult conditions employees face in the labor market, and the responsibilities employers should have to provide jobs that meet acceptable community standards.

People-Powered Prosperity

The most prosperous states are anchored by an educated and healthy workforce and offer opportunities for people to innovate and contribute. Moving into the 2018 statewide elections and subsequent governor’s administration, Georgia leaders can seize a golden opportunity to chart a better economic course. People-Powered Prosperity details a new vision for how state lawmakers can pursue that strategy and ways they can responsibly pay for it. The report outlines a public investment plan aimed at four strategic goals, which include eight specific policy recommendations such as targeted funding hikes for public schools and an ambitious ramp-up of assistance to help families afford child care. We also present a case to show how Georgia can afford to raise $1 billion in new annual revenues as a meaningful down payment on the strategy, a shared investment of reasonable scope.