The path to a fulfilling and well-paying career in Baltimore may not run through a college.
Young people and their parents, elected officials and employers are rethinking the route from high school to the workforce. For many, a registered apprenticeship is the best answer.
Maryland’s school reform initiative, known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, contains an ambitious goal that calls for 45 percent of Maryland students to graduate from high school with a youth apprenticeship or a certified industry credential by 2030.
Meeting that target will require a massive increase in participation. About 4,100 students graduated with such a credential in 2021, out of about 60,000 total graduates across all 24 school systems.
While apprenticeships are common in Europe, their value is still underappreciated in the U.S., supporters say. At the same time, industries beyond the construction trades—from health care to cybersecurity—are beginning to embrace the “earn while you learn” education and workforce development model.
The latest report from the Abell Foundation addresses the steps needed to grow the number of apprenticeship opportunities in Maryland, from education needed to dispel myths to gaining support of employers.
Baltimore Fishbowl spoke with the author of the report, Linda Dworak, director of the Maryland Philanthropy Network’s Baltimore Workforce Funders Collaborative, to gain more insight. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Baltimore Fishbowl: Let’s talk about why apprenticeships are valuable, both to the person participating in it and the employer.
Linda Dworak: Registered apprenticeships are great for somebody seeking a career. They’re jobs that pay you to work and learn at the same time. And while you’re doing that, you learn the skills and competencies in your field that are particularly relevant to the employer who’s sponsoring the apprenticeship. You hit milestones as you build your skills, through hands-on learning and through classroom learning as well. And each time you hit a milestone, you earn a pay increase. As a person seeking a career, it’s a way to get paid to learn to work with your hands, or work with your skills. … You have a mentor working with you, and you end up as what in the apprenticeship field they call a ‘journeyperson,’ which is really a term for being an employee with solid hands-on skills and knowledge that is valued by your employer.
There’s also advantages to the employers. For employers who are hosting apprenticeships, they have the opportunity to build a workforce that has the specific skills that they need for their company, and they have the opportunity to train someone so that they understand your work culture and values. The employee, when the apprenticeship ends, has a deep buy-in and connection with the company. They have shown, over time, their willingness to learn and grow. And you’re also giving opportunities to more senior folks within your company who have gained a lot of skills over the years to be recognized for their skills, because they’re being asked to mentor a new employee.
BFB: You started by saying registered apprenticeships? Is the registration an important part, and is there something folks should think about regarding registered apprenticeships versus unregistered ones or other training programs?
LD: When you’re running a registered apprenticeship, you have a team of folks who look over your curriculum and your plan to make sure that it makes sense and has high value to your company and to the individual participating. It’s really a way of validating that your apprenticeship has value to you and your and your employees. It’s also a way for those apprentices to be able to earn something that’s valued in the marketplace….The intention is not for them to spend a little time with the employer and then take off and go somewhere else. But eventually we all have careers that we build, and we have times when we may move to another employer. A registered apprenticeship gives you a validated certification of approval that has value in the marketplace.
BFB: I would imagine the registration is with the state, like the state labor department or education department.
LD: It’s with the state Department of Labor. A lot of people think that an apprenticeship is the same thing as an internship. When I hear the term registered apprenticeship, I know that the person talking about apprenticeship is really talking about an apprenticeship, a real apprenticeship. Sometimes the term apprenticeship is thrown around as basically a paid internship that doesn’t actually have a built-in progression of wages, and actually doesn’t end up in a long term job. That’s why I emphasize this term. A registered apprenticeship is good, because what we’re talking about is something really specific.
Beyond Trades
BFB: Makes sense. Are there other misperceptions that should be addressed about this topic?
LD: A lot of people think of apprenticeship as just being in the building trades or just being in unions or just being for men. They think of apprenticeships as maybe being a poor choice, as opposed to going to college. These are all things that are not true. They’re all misperceptions.
There are apprenticeships in a lot of different sectors. There are apprenticeships that are sponsored by unions, and those not by unions. And there are definitely opportunities for women and people of all different aptitudes and cultures to be part of apprenticeship. They’re also really valuable. In our report we talk about the state analysis that showed that Marylanders who had completed apprenticeships in 2012-2013 had a median salary of $82,900 five years later – nearly double the earnings of those who got an associate degree from a community college.
BFB: Your point hits home that you hear the word apprentice or journeyman and you think electrician or plumber or welder or HVAC. I was interested to see that there are a lot more industries, like in the medical field, beginning to adopt apprenticeships. Will this expansion beyond building trades happen naturally, or is it something that policymakers need to think about to push things in that direction?
LD: The reason why apprenticeships have been most common in the building trades has a lot to do with unions, and unions advocating for good jobs for workers. So it’s not a bad thing that it comes out of that tradition. But there are leading employers across the country in the IT sector that have seen that apprenticeship is a really good model. It makes more sense for them to use apprenticeship as a model for bringing in new talent into their organizations. Some of it’s going to happen on its own, because it’s there’s a really solid business case for it.
But because there are so many misperceptions, and also because it’s not the standard way of doing business in many other sectors, to fully expand apprenticeship more broadly in the business world, to health care and IT fields and other types of businesses does require advocacy. It requires government support and I would say policy support to help make that happen, to help with the uptick. It’s very common in Europe to have apprenticeship in a lot of different fields. It just hasn’t been the way we’ve done things in the United States. It’s going to take efforts to change people’s mindsets and perceptions and maybe change the way they allocate resources to support apprenticeship.
Barriers like drivers’ licenses
BFB: The Abell report talks about the specific needs in Baltimore City to grow apprenticeship. Baltimore is a majority African American city, and perhaps apprenticeships aren’t either fully endorsed or promoted within Baltimore City Public School System, or there’s a need for more diversity and more involvement by Baltimore City young people in apprenticeships. Why is that?
LD: Maryland has been working really hard to expand apprenticeships in fields like health care, IT and other sectors, and it’s done so through grant programs and tax incentives. There have been federal investments in expanding apprenticeships – like through the Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, a nonprofit organization that works with a set of employers, and represents most of the major health care employers in Baltimore. They have for a long time been working to help fill jobs or occupations that are hard for those employers to recruit for. People living in Baltimore communities often don’t have access to those jobs or haven’t traditionally had access. So they’re trying to build these pathways….As a result, now there are more women and people of color in registered apprenticeships in Maryland.
By having more types of apprenticeships beyond just the trades, you’re going to attract people with different interests and talents. More work still has to be done to make sure that we’re not just segregating people by occupation. For examle, you don’t want to have only women in health care and only men in the building trades. There are good jobs in both spaces.
One of the big reasons why many Baltimore residents don’t access apprenticeship is because of structural or systems barriers that they face. For many of the apprenticeships in the trades, you have to have a car and a driver’s license. That’s one of the biggest barriers to Baltimore residents to participate in apprenticeship, because so many Baltimore residents don’t have a driver’s license, either because there’s no driver’s education in schools, or people have fines and fees or other issues that have resulted in them having a driver’s license suspension. The cost of obtaining a car has gotten really expensive. Car insurance rates are disproportionately higher for ZIP codes where predominantly African American residents live.
All of these things stack up to make it really hard for people to get into certain kinds of apprenticeships where you have to have a car. There are other types of barriers that keep people out of participation such as insufficient access to childcare, the need to brush up on math skills, and general lack of exposure to the different types of careers that are out there. There’s also some cultural issues in some workplaces where there’s had to be efforts for employers and unions to work on helping change workplace culture so that it’s more welcoming to women and people of color.
BFB: Do you want to address the GED education issue? Is that something that needs to be rethought a little bit?
LD: There are academic requirements to entering many of the apprenticeships. For some of them, you have to pass an entrance exam. One of the ways that we can help folks to get through that are through strong pre-apprenticeship programs. Pre-apprenticeship programs are those that help folks who haven’t done math in a long time, or maybe were never really good at it, to refresh their math skills so that they can pass an entrance exam to get into an apprenticeship. If you’re going to be an electrician, for example, you’ve got to know some math. If you are going to be a carpenter, you’ve got to know how to measure. Some people just have rusty skills. Other people never really learned it in school. So we need to have programs that help folks overcome those types of academic barriers…. We can also support programs like the Goodwill Excel Center downtown, which is an alternative high school that’s helping Baltimore residents who don’t have a high school diploma to get a high school diploma.
BFB: The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future calls for 45 percent of Maryland students to graduate from high school with a youth apprenticeship or a certified industry credential by 2030. Is that doable? Is that an achievable number? Is that the right goal for us?
LD: The state has been further homing in on that goal, to really focus it on registered apprenticeship as the primary way of meeting the goal. This is hard for Baltimore. This is hard for every jurisdiction in the state of Maryland, because the school systems haven’t been set up to do that, and very few young people currently are in apprenticeships. In the past, they’ve been in what’s called youth apprenticeships, which are closer to internships. And now, if the goal is really to get them into registered apprenticeships, because they’re the gold standard, they are the best apprenticeships, then we’ve got to do massive expansion of apprenticeship to meet that goal. For Baltimore City schools, you’d need about 1,900 city school seniors completing their education with a registered apprenticeship, or another kind of youth apprenticeship in order to meet the goal. And in 2024 they were something like 16 students. So you’ve got to go from 16 to 1,900. It’s huge.
BFB: Is it the right goal to have?
LD: The goal is a great aspirational goal. It helps address the problem where so many young people are graduating from high school and find themselves without any employment. They’re not in jobs, or they’re not in school. But to achieve even a fraction of that goal, we’re going to need not only school systems like Baltimore City Schools that are working really hard to figure this out and to set up programs, but we also need employers to buy into this. And there’s no mandate that employers offer apprenticeship, and it won’t work unless we have the employers on board. So the hardest part, in my opinion, right now, is building up more employer buy-in into apprenticeship.
BFB: What are the main next steps that have to happen for Maryland to be heading in a better direction in the apprenticeship world?
LD: There is a bill in Annapolis now, the RAISE Act, that would help address some systems issues within the apprenticeship system. They’re going to be looking at some of the different requirements for folks to get licenses through apprenticeship, clarify the rules about the mentoring, and what they call the journeyman-to-apprentice ratio. They’re going to be rethinking what the youth apprenticeship is, and making some changes around how the state is going to monitor and set rules. We also need to continue to communicate about what apprenticeship is and why it’s a value to both employers and to families. We need to continue to look at how we address those systemic barriers. There’s been a pilot program sponsored by Senator Cory McRay to expand drivers’ education in schools. We need to look at how we reduce those disparities in car insurance rates. There are programs in other states that offer special child care incentives to individuals who are enrolled in apprenticeship or waive fees and fines if they’re participating in an apprenticeship, so that they can overcome some of those barriers. So I think we need a comprehensive look at how we address those barriers.
