New Apprenticeship Proposal Draws Warning on Scope of Overhaul

The broadest overhaul of the federal government’s registered apprenticeship program since 2008 is aimed at making the government’s premier job training accreditation more equitable, efficient, and built to respond to new and emerging industries.

But some question whether the effort from the US Labor Department may be too ambitious, and whether it will add too many new requirements to a program that businesses and other sponsors of apprenticeships say is too difficult to participate in.

DOL leaders maintain that the new data reporting requirements for program sponsors—added for metrics like equity and apprentice pay—and the proposed tweaks to what programs should look like will ensure that apprentices are aware of their pay and time commitment to the program, and are fully competent in the skills they’re training for.

The department’s endeavor to update the registered apprenticeship model comes as demand for high-skilled workers has accelerated under massive federal investments in renewable energy and infrastructure and is a key requirement in the large tax credits offered to companies under the Inflation Reduction Act. The Biden administration maintains that the program ensures that workers have an equitable opportunity to receive high quality job training that leads to better employment and pay.

“This rule seeks to on one hand expand” registered apprenticeships, said Brent Parton, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Employment and Training Administration. “But do so in a way that is also holding up and strengthening our ability to ensure the apprenticeship system delivers results for the coming years.”

The proposed rule released earlier this month includes major changes to how training programs should be structured, including requiring apprenticeship programs to provide at least 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and 144 hours of classroom training and increase the number of fully trained journeyman that must work alongside an apprentice.

Currently, registered apprenticeship programs can determine a trainee’s completion of the program based on three methods: their competency or mastery of the skills without an explicit time requirement; the hours they spent training; or a combination of both hours and skills achievement. The new rule would require programs to only adopt a time-based model, a change that has drawn concerns from Republicans and business groups.

“The misguided proposal will discourage employer participation in the GRAP system by adding more bureaucracy and paperwork requirements while also eliminating flexible competency-based approaches to workforce development that benefit apprentices and employers,” said Ben Brubeck, vice president of regulatory, labor, and state affairs for the Associated Builders and Contractors, in an emailed statement.

“As currently written, [the Biden administration’s] proposal threatens to undermine significant investments recently made by taxpayers in infrastructure, clean energy, and manufacturing projects procured by government and private owners,” he said.

Mandatory Disclosures

The proposal also requires numerous disclosures from training program sponsors, including submitting an equitable recruitment plan, maintaining documents related to employment decisions impacting apprentices, and providing information about the training program’s operation, performance, and progress, among other asks.

Parton said the data requirements of the proposal will help the agency modernize the information it has, and allow for “a better national picture” that will help the agency gauge the health of the program and its effectiveness for businesses and workers.

But, House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) has complained that the DOL’s proposal, and in particular the requirements for companies to expand diversity efforts, is “chock full of pandering buzzwords like ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’—telltale signs that meaningful career pathways for Americans are about to be forcefully drowned in even more woke bureaucracy.”

“If the goal was to make an already dysfunctional registered apprenticeship system less workable and relevant to the needs of workers and employers, this proposed rule appears likely to succeed,” she said in a statement.

Splintering, Reciprocity

Another major piece of the proposal would prohibit new occupations from being approved as eligible for a training program if the job “replicates a significant portion of the work processes from another occupation” that has already been approved by the Office of Apprenticeship.

Currently, for training providers to create registered apprenticeships, they must have the particular skill or occupation they want to train for approved by the Office of Apprenticeship.

The DOL says this change will prevent comprehensive training programs for specific occupations from being “splintered” into individual skillsets, which could “lead to a less skilled apprentice who would be less able to find and retain the type of work the registered apprenticeship program is designed to provide to apprentices,” according to the proposed rule.

Job training advocacy groups and business, however, have raised concerns that this provision would limit the ability for apprenticeships to expand into new occupations.

“I think we all agree that we don’t want to be in a place where an apprenticeship program can come in and undermine another apprenticeship program with lower wages and what have you,” John Colborn, interim executive director of Apprenticeships for America, a non-profit focused on job training issues, said during a webinar on the rule Dec 21. “But I think we also have seen that sometimes this concern about splintering holds back apprenticeships from being able to really robustly enter new occupational areas.”

Colborn noted that the challenge will be to sort out a way to “find an appropriate balance between those two concerns.”

The scope of the changes to the program have drawn a mixed reaction. While Republicans and business groups have voiced concerns about the proposal, some provisions may be welcomed by those groups, like those requiring states to grant reciprocity to training programs offered by national employers that are approved on a national scale.

Currently, national employers may have to navigate different requirements state-by-state to get approval to offer the program in a certain jurisdiction.

Unions, which participate in a large share of registered apprenticeships, are likely to applaud several of the changes, in particular provisions focused on equity and wrap around services. However, multiple unions contacted for this story requested more time to review the rule before responding.