Hello World!
Hi everyone – my name is Willie Chang, and I am an HOD intern at the TN Department of Economic and Community Development (ECD). My learning goal for the semester was to examine how workforce development programs – specifically the policies at the state level – are impacting the lives of Tennesseans. I am motivated to learn more about this because I while I have had very limited exposure to such programs, I am interested in working the public sector one day. My supervisor is Jamie Stitt, the Assistant Commissioner of Economic and Workforce Development at the ECD, so I thought that this would be a great opportunity to learn more about how the people of Tennessee could possibly benefit from these initiatives.
I have had the pleasure of working with Ann Thompson, Director of Workforce Development, at the ECD during my time at the site. She was ecstatic to hear that I both had the capacity and interest to help her out with a workforce development project. Ann sent over a few articles, briefs, and reports about the state of apprenticeship programs in the US, opportunities for expansion and further development, and recent efforts to promote apprenticeship in the state of Tennessee. After reading through these papers, I drafted a brief memo on apprenticeships, synthesizing my learnings and conclusions. This paper highlighted best practices of other states and also provided recommendations for the state. I found this assignment to be something very similar to the work that I had for a previous Public Policy class that I had taken for the HOD major, so it was a great feeling realizing that a skill that I developed through my coursework was utilized at my internship.
I think that it is important to establish what exactly an apprenticeship is. While I had certainly heard the term before, I was not sure how it was differentiated from an internship or co-op. An apprenticeship is a specific type of workplace program where apprentices earn money for their work, receive job-related technical instruction, learn on-the-job under the direction of their employers, and are awarded industry-recognized credentials¹. Thus, apprenticeships provide an attractive alternative to the traditional post-secondary path, especially considering that some students go into debt just to go to college and are unable to find a job after graduation. The outcomes for apprentices also speak for themselves, as the current net value of lifetime earnings gains (after cost) is $269,000 per apprentice compared with between $96,000 to $123,000 for community college attendees, and around $40,000 for those who took part in Workforce Investment Act training programs², highlighting the fact that apprenticeships are the best alternative in regards to the return on investment.
For this memo, I also did some research into the demographic trends for the state of Tennessee to build a case for the importance of acting now. I then spent some time looking into what other states are doing in regards to apprenticeship program and compiled all of my notes in a spreadsheet so I could easily compare the similarities and differences between the different programs of each state. It was definitely difficult to keep the memo short, and despite keeping it as concise as I could, the “one-page” memo still ended up being two pages. However, I think that it was able to provide a snapshot of the current state of apprenticeship in other states and a clear roadmap for the future.
