“How do we change our education institutions to prepare people for this sort of rapid shift in what people do and what they need to know? … Everyone will have to do some learning. We’ve had skill mismatch in the past but not at this level.”

The concept of work-based learning has drawn a groundswell of support in recent years. Yet in practice, apprenticeship programs and other work-based courses in the US remain underresourced and underused paths for people to gain in-demand skills and for employers to find the best talent that’s out there. In the absence of federal action, what can businesses, educational institutions, and local and state governments do in terms of funding and policy to support programs that give people paid on-the-job training? How can we build a jobs-based superhighway that connects young people with promising careers while offering them formal recognition of the skills they learn in the workplace and multiple opportunities for upskilling?

Annelies Goger, Brookings fellow, economic geographer and Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow, investigates how to scale earn-and-learn opportunities in the US, how to build equitable skills-based hiring data systems, and how to leverage federal investments in infrastructure and innovation ecosystems to improve access to quality jobs and learning opportunities. During her recent visit to campus, Goger discussed her work examining apprenticeship programs and policies designed to build a better workplace learning system.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation. Some responses have been edited for clarity and length.

The term “skills gap” is used with increasing frequency in conversations and writings about the workforce, but it can mean different things to different people. Conceptually, how do you frame the “skills gap” in your research?

I think employers use “skills gap” to reflect when they’re having a harder time than they used to finding the right candidate to fill a certain position. In the past, employers could post a job vacancy and description and get a bunch of candidates to apply, and those people were well aligned with what they were hiring for. That’s a very passive way to hire – just post it and they come to you. This process worked, in part, because demographics were in their favor – there were plenty of people to choose from. As the labor market has tightened and we see demographic shifts, lower immigration [and] all sorts of technological shifts, finding the right candidate has become harder.

People think of this issue as a skill gap: a gap between the skills people have and what employers need. But I think this is a very superficial way to understand the problem. In my research I’ve reframed the issue, getting away from this “deficit” terminology, which oversimplifies the problem and treats potential candidates as if they have some deficiency and all they would need to do is insert a certain skill and they will automatically fill a specific role. It’s unfortunately not that simple.

If we were to provide more opportunities for people to build skills in the workplace and recognize the learning as valuable, it would help resolve the misalignment between what employers want and what the education system teaches. So, instead of thinking about it as a lack of skills, we can see it as a lack of opportunities for individuals to gain a wide range of skills and experiences. That’s the first path that, conceptually, I go down in rethinking the skills gap.

What are some of the less visible issues that contribute to the skills gap?

Another serious issue we’re not discussing enough is the experience gap, resulting from people not having opportunities to gain experience, to get out into the workplace, to see what’s out there, to see people in action in different realms that they haven’t been exposed to before.

If we don’t give people exposure to hands-on learning in a work environment, then they must rely on what they already know – what their parents or other family members or their friends do for a living – to make career decisions, without the full menu of options.

This self-perpetuating experience gap is especially problematic because it reproduces the generational wealth gap. I was the first in my family to go to college, and I had to go out of my way to find people who could give me information, much of which I didn’t know that I needed.

How do you expect AI and other technologies to impact these issues?

I think we should approach AI with a skills mismatch perspective. With AI potentially changing every role in every industry, job descriptions five years from now might be very different from what they are today. So, how do we change our education institutions to prepare people for this sort of rapid shift in what people do and what they need to know? I think it will require all hands on deck. Everyone will have to do some learning. We’ve had skill mismatch in the past but not at this level.

Apprenticeships in Action

Youth apprenticeships are a focal point of your research. These programs often give students their first exposure to the world of work and open career pathways that would otherwise be out of reach. What difference do they make in a young person’s career path?

When I hear directly from youth apprentices, they highlight a bunch of benefits – the first is that it’s paid. To quote one of these former apprentices, Jubei Brown-Weaver, “Life’s like a sandwich. No matter which way you flip it, the bread comes first.” You must value a person’s time, and if you don’t, they will go work somewhere that pays because they need some money to survive. It’s important to make sure when we’re building apprenticeship ecosystems that these programs are student-centered and grounded in input from youth about their needs and what will make it attractive to them.

Using Brown-Weaver as an example, he wanted to work in cybersecurity, and he would sit in physics class twiddling his thumbs. Yet as soon as he was given that opportunity to go into the workplace and start to earn a check, he would come back to school with the mindset that he knew what he wanted to do, and he had an idea of how what he was learning in school would get him there. In this way, an early apprenticeship gives the apprentice a sense of how what they learn in the classroom applies to real life.

I’ve also observed how apprenticeships can give young people confidence. Most high schoolers haven’t yet crafted their own sense of self, formed their whole identity or determined their life preferences. When they go out into the workplace and get feedback, and they try different things, they get a better sense of what suits them. They return to high school with stronger confidence about their future, about what they do well.

That is a great point. How else do you see apprenticeships affecting how young people relate to formal education?

The real-life experiences gained through apprenticeships allow young people to sort out and filter the information they receive about the working world, giving them assurance that what they’re choosing is right for them and helping to assuage their anxiety about the future.

Even straight-A students, those who have no issues interacting with their teachers or peers, benefit from workplace experiences that teach them how to interact with colleagues. We might call these soft skills – how to communicate, delegate and manage conflict – which employers do in fact highly demand.

Building a System That Works

You’ve written about the need to change how apprenticeships are structured in the US. What reforms are most urgent?

We haven’t updated our apprenticeship legislation since the 1930s. It is difficult to overstate the need for systemwide updates.

On a national level we have no permanent funding stream for related instruction, meaning that if an employer starts an apprenticeship, they either have to provide the training themselves, which is costly, or a community college has to grant money to do it – otherwise you don’t have funding for that seat. Someone must pay for the instruction, and the current infrastructure generally pushes the burden onto these stakeholders because there’s no stable funding source.

We also must fix our definitions. People say, “youth entrepreneurship,” they say “technical education,” “apprenticeship,” “registered apprenticeship,” “degree apprenticeship” – they mean completely different things in different places. It’s all over the map, and it’s hard to make any reform if saying youth apprenticeship in one place means something different than saying it somewhere else.

We need some standard metrics defining what outcomes we should look at and what’s the data we collect. We need to figure out how to engage multiple employers in an efficient way to standardize the current system without re-creating it from scratch.

Is there a model out there that you view as a promising archetype?

Indiana recently created the Indiana Career Apprenticeship Pathway. Based on the Swiss model, INCAP is a group of what’s called industry talent associations – they have six of them so far. It’s a new model, so we don’t yet know if it will work or not, but that’s where we’re headed.

Most other countries have standardized their occupational curricula. Our country is kind of allergic to the word “standards.” If we had national apprenticeship curricula and national occupational standards at different levels, then employers would know what rigor to expect from a certain credential. In Switzerland, that’s how the system works – the talent association for Biotech, for example, defines the pathway, writes the exams and administers the exams. They know across employers who’s training them to the standard that they need in that industry, and that brings a level of quality and rigor to the training.

One solution that’s recently gained traction is “skills-based hiring,” which often means removing degree requirements from job postings. What would this approach need to include for it to mitigate skills mismatches?

Let’s consider that the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees have skills, but employers can’t easily distinguish whether they’re a good fit for a certain job. One solution is to base hiring on more than a degree, and then employers would look at other ways to validate and verify what a good fit would be. That first step of narrowing the pool is key, and degree requirements create a shortcut for hirers. So, we need to make it equally simple for those without degrees, and that’s not easy.

There are a lot of ways to give credit for work-based learning or experiential learning from a job, as well as accepting nondegree credentials, including an assessment of some kind. These processes would involve going around the education system and creating competency-based evaluations of someone’s learning. If we had better data – if we had modern data systems – and every credential reported outcomes and if people could tie their training program to their identity, then we could see that people with certain qualifications had certain earnings on average with certain types of occupational jobs. We could observe patterns in the data if we tracked the outcomes of credentials. But right now we don’t have the robust, real-time data systems we need for knowing what happens to people after they finish a credential or training program. It is not very reasonable to expect that short-term credential, on its own, will have huge impacts on earnings, so we need to be able to understand the outcomes of a combination of things a person has done, whether it is formal education, work experience, the military or something else.

Looking Ahead

Is there any research you’re working on or organization that you’re working with that you want to highlight?

I have a project with the American Institutes for Research, and we recently released a blueprint focused on youth economic mobility and how to work across fragmented systems to set youth up for success. We interviewed 21 state and local innovators to highlight lessons learned and strategies for funders to build cross-program capacity.

Another project focuses on the ROI for apprenticeship, asking how do we arrive at a shared metric for understanding the business ROI for investing in apprenticeships? What are the data that we would need to successfully measure it? How do we build the infrastructure for employers to make decisions about whether there is a business case or not and if it makes sense to invest, why it is worthwhile. If an employer is not getting an ROI after a few years, they probably shouldn’t be doing it or they need to change the program to get there.

A lot of groups across the country are realizing that if they can’t solve the problem of employer engagement and participation, none of the other stuff works. Making training industry-driven [and] getting employers bought in is a growing priority in the coming years. Especially with the current administration, I think this message will resonate strongly. If we can’t get industry to adopt a program, then what’s the point? How could we do workplace learning without the work?

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• Keyword(s):
• skills gap 26
• workforce development 72