How to Start Your Own Apprenticeship Program

Jessica Lewis

• Publisher: Mobu enterprises
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780578740645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Construction Industry
• Index: Business

In How to Start Your Own Apprenticeship Program, you will learn:

• How to create a curriculum
• How to find partners
• How to become registered with the Department of Labor

This book is a how-to guide on developing your own superior workforce through the creation of an apprenticeship program. Apprenticeship programs can be used in any industry that offers formal or informal education via trade, technical, or traditional schools.

Author Jessica Lewis, owner of Mobu Enterprises, shares her expertise garnered from working in corporate settings, training hundreds of students, and starting and running her own green construction firm. She carries the perspective that in order to be the best, you need to work with the best, which means you have to train the best?-?a principle that has inspired How to Start Your Own Apprenticeship Program. This book will help you create, start, register, and grow your very own apprenticeship program. Best of all, it will provide you with knowledge that will help you train the best employees your business has ever had. The sky is not the limit!

Part I

The Snacketizer

Chapter 1

What You Need to Know

As with any new business endeavor, before you can begin, you’ve got to get a clear vision of your idea. What do you want it to accomplish? Who do you envision participating? What resources will you use to make it a reality? Beyond that, though, apprenticeships have specific requirements that must be factored in. Use these categories to help you brainstorm your idea and home in on your apprenticeship vision.

Apprenticeship Program Requirements

Mentors Who Will Do the On-the-Job Training

Federal regulations require mentor-student ratios to be 1:1 for apprenticeship programs. If your program will be registered with the DOL, it is required that each participant has a mentor who can monitor, teach, and evaluate their learned competencies in the classroom and on the job.

I suggest you outline the curriculum your program will teach participants first. Then, next to each topic, list the names of a few veterans in your industry who are able and willing to teach the topics and give one-on-one mentoring. If your industry requires licensing, I would not recommend inviting unlicensed individuals to be your apprenticeship instructors. I know many people who learned their trades by doing, but this does not replace learning core competencies that are necessary to be successful in your industry. I call these people the bootleggers of the world—they have no formal training, but they “know” how to do certain tasks—though often this knowledge is incomplete or haphazard. Having a licensed individual will ensure shortcuts are not taken and the participants are gaining hands-on experience in conjunction with the book knowledge they are acquiring in their in-class training.

A Partnership with a Local Technical School

In construction, it’s critical to attend trade school where you learn book knowledge so you can competently work in the industry with minimal mistakes, because those mistakes can mean injury or death. This is true for your apprenticeship participants, too. I’m sure you’ve heard enough about workplace accidents, so I will spare you the graphic descriptions, but however you gained your book knowledge in your respective industry, it would benefit you to expose your apprentices to the same process. You may have gone to a technical college, a specialty school for restaurant and hospitality management, or an online certification program from IBM, to name just a few examples. Whatever school you attended, partner with that school or one like it near you to help you design a curriculum that will be in alignment with the jobs you have available at your company and address the workplace challenges you may be experiencing.

The school you choose most likely will have classes that offer coursework similar to your position skill sets, and you should work with the school to create a partnership that makes sense for your company. For me, I wanted my participants to go straight from my curriculum to taking and passing the general contractor state exam without having to study fourteen books first. Code is different in certain states, but the technical school will teach the foundational principles, and then all the student has to add to their learning is the information specific to state codes. I chose Central Georgia Technical College as a regional school to partner with as well as Penn Foster, which is a national online school.

You can also partner with any youth trade school at the high school level. This route is not much different, except you would be working with Career Academy, Job Corps, or equivalent institutions that typically serve people between the ages of...