How About Offering Apprenticeships For People Who Already Work For You?

Apprenticeships are hot. They’re expanding well beyond the trades, where they’re traditionally known, into fields like tech, professional services, and healthcare—and governments and employers are eager to see even more growth. And for good reason.

Apprenticeships are, in many ways, the holy grail for working learners—providing an education that’s targeted to in-demand roles, while also paying them full-time wages for work they do while they’re learning.

It’s a powerful package. But there’s one big catch: apprenticeships leave out the 95M frontline workers who already have jobs, but who still may need additional education to move up in their careers.

Sure, people could quit their jobs and enter an apprenticeship, but that often feels like a risky proposition for workers who are more than a few years into their career. And it doesn’t help employers—who are experiencing massive churn in their frontline roles—at all.

But what if we took what’s best about apprenticeships—formal education, on-the-job training, and full-time wages—and embedded it in jobs that people are already in? It’s an idea that a number of large, progressive employers like Walmart, Target and many healthcare systems are experimenting with.

In fact, employers across a range of industries have been rapidly increasing what Opportunity@Work calls “informal apprenticeships.” The nonprofit, which advocates for new pathways into good jobs, recently did an analysis with Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm, that found that the number of roles with informal apprenticeships associated with them had more than doubled, to 208 occupations, in the past decade.

While federally-registered apprenticeships remain the gold standard, these other options can dramatically expand the number of people who can participate in valuable earn-and-learn programs. Modern apprenticeships that are embedded in people’s current jobs are both more accessible for workers and more flexible and lower-cost for employers. That lowers the barrier to entry for learners and employers alike.

The key is to ensure these apprenticeships are high quality—featuring formal education, on-the-job training tailored to in-demand roles, and a good wage.

Done well, modern apprenticeships can be particularly powerful for workers whose jobs are vulnerable to automation, and for employers who are struggling to find enough workers for critical roles like cybersecurity analyst, frontline manager, or pharmacy tech.

Target, for one, is doing just that. As digital transformation remakes the retail industry, companies are competing hard for technical talent. And amid this war for talent, Target realized that hiring alone wouldn’t fill all of their in-demand, technical roles.

In order to close skill gaps internally, Target launched an education platform in 2021 that offers degree, certificate, and bootcamp programs for employees. It then set up an “Emerging Engineer Program” that taps into the technical bootcamps on the platform and pairs them with on-the-job training. As employees near graduation from the bootcamps, they are asked to apply to the apprenticeship program. If selected, they receive additional training and mentoring while working full-time as an “emerging engineer,” receiving a full engineer’s salary.

One graduate of the program, Sara Oros, moved from an in-store role to an engineering role after graduating from a University of Minnesota bootcamp and completing other training. She is now a software engineer based out of Target’s Minneapolis headquarters.

Walmart runs a similar program from cybersecurity analysts. After one year as an apprentice, being paid a full-time analyst salary, employees are eligible to be promoted to a cyber specialist role, which comes with an even bigger raise.

Again, the winning combination is quality education programs tailored to jobs of the future and paired with paid on-the-job learning. Those qualities can exist across both registered apprenticeships and modern ones outside that formal system.

And modern apprenticeships can open the door to a lot more people. When unemployment is at a rock bottom 3.6%, we can’t just be educating the unemployed for the jobs of the future.

Millions of Americans who are already on the job need a new path to stay employed and advance. Modern apprenticeships provide that way.