The U.S. Needs More Apprentices. Here’s Why – and How – to Start with Immigrants.
Apprenticeships fill critical gaps in the U.S. workforce – particularly in industries like manufacturing and construction, essential to rebuilding the U.S. infrastructure. And they advance economic mobility in significant ways: Graduates can expect to earn an average starting salary of $77,000.
A thriving U.S. apprenticeship system will help power the U.S. economic recovery. But to get there, we need more apprentices. At least 30 of every 100 skilled trade jobs are going unfilled, a gap that has created 2.4 million open manufacturing positions in the U.S. And, unless systems change, the shortage will get worse: More than a quarter of current skilled trade workers are within 10 years of retirement.
The U.S. workforce needs real strategies to encourage historically underrepresented groups, including women and people of color, to become apprentices. Promoting immigrant and refugee access to these programs is a solid place to start. By 2030, immigrants and their children will comprise 97% of net U.S. workforce growth – yet as of now, they comprise just a sliver of U.S. apprentices.
Immigration status isn’t an issue: U.S. citizenship isn’t required to become an apprentice. Rather, language barriers are a core driver of this disparity. The U.S. serves less than 4% of the needs of adult English learners, meaning that 20 million potential apprentices – immigrants, refugees, and speakers of other languages with valuable skills, credentials, experience, and potential – do not yet have the English skills to participate in these programs. Adults who are still learning English earn up to 40% less than their peers who speak the language proficiently.
Pre-apprenticeships, particularly those focused on career-aligned language upskilling, can bridge the opportunity gap. Successful programs borrow from apprenticeships’ core strengths to boost language learners’ success in two key ways:
Task-based learning: Just as apprenticeship programs teach industry-aligned skills, effective language upskilling should be approached in the same way, organizing courses around career-aligned tasks rather than abstract linguistic concepts.
On-the-job access: Apprenticeships offer working adults the opportunity to learn real-life skills as they earn living wages; language upskilling programs can similarly be deployed in workforce settings and tied to real workplace needs.
At EnGen, we’ve seen the potential of language-based pre-apprenticeships in action. ADVANCE, a workforce development group that’s part of Lake Tahoe Community College, approached us in 2021 to make its Ski Lift Maintenance Apprenticeship more accessible to immigrants, refugees, and speakers of other languages. With a local economy dependent on ski tourism and a dearth of ski workers, ADVANCE understood that building inclusive career pathways was a lifeline for its region. EnGen used National Ski Areas Association’s Lift Maintenance Training Guide to create a highly-tailored, industry-aligned language pathway that ensured language learners could access the technical language needed to advance in the apprenticeship program.
Scaling ADVANCE’s success holds promise to transform workers’ lives – and workforces – across the country. EnGen offers a growing catalog of career-aligned language pathways that serve as “off the shelf” pre-apprenticeship models for employers, workforce development orgs, education institutions invested in building equitable pathways to apprenticeships.
Language pathway offerings like Introduction to Warehouse Machinery promote access to established apprenticeships in manufacturing, where other offerings – like phlebotomy, pharmacy technician, and certified nursing assistant – can support emerging pre-apprenticeship programs in critically understaffed sectors like healthcare, where an estimated 263,000 immigrants and refugees with health credentials are currently unemployed or underemployed in the U.S., due to limited English proficiency and other systemic barriers.
Just as apprenticeships are an economic engine in the United States, English proficiency is the linchpin of immigrant workforce inclusion. Combining the two – in language-based pre-apprenticeship models – will catalyze both economic mobility and recovery in communities across the country.
Are you ready to get started in building a language-focused pre-apprenticeship model?
To learn more about creating English onramps to apprenticeship programs, read this EnGen one-pager, “Pre-Apprenticeship Solutions for English Language Learners,” and watch this recent presentation by EnGen founder and Chief Education Officer Katie Brown.