Bob Lerman, an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute and leading researcher on and advocate for apprenticeships, discusses the role of apprenticeships in workforce development and economic mobility. He defines apprenticeships as a combination of on-the-job learning and classroom instruction, leading to occupational expertise. Lerman emphasizes the importance of work-based learning and the need for a major effort to promote apprenticeships among employers. He believes that a robust apprenticeship system can significantly contribute to a positive change in the U.S. workforce. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back. I'm really looking forward to this conversation today. Julian apprenticeships are becoming increasingly front and center as a pathway to economic mobility in the US, even more so since our springtime discussion with John Colborn from Apprenticeships for America. So it really feels like the right time to take a deeper dive into this topic. Julian: Yes, I completely agree, and I am particularly excited to get the perspective of today's guest. He's someone I've known for decades who has been beating the drum on the importance of apprenticeship since I met him, and that drumbeat is getting louder by the day. Kaitlin: It really is. And without further ado, let's introduce our guest, Bob Lehrman. Bob is an Institute Fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at Urban Institute, and the leading US researcher on apprenticeship. He's a member of the board of the International Network on Innovation Apprenticeship, head of Urban Institute's Apprenticeship Group, and established the American Institute for Innovative Apprenticeship. Bob has published widely on apprenticeship, currently heads the evaluation of the American Apprenticeship Initiative and is Chairman of the Board of Apprenticeships for America. He is also a Professor of Economics at American University and a Research Fellow at Iza in Bonn, Germany. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today, Bob, Bob Lehrman: Well, thank you for having me. Julian: Yes, Bob, really appreciate you taking the time and you always, always forget to talk with you. And please tell us about your background and history with the apprenticeship movement. Bob: I studied youth unemployment when I was in graduate school. My dissertation was on youth unemployment, and I had a long interest in young people entering the workforce, but we always saw that the unemployment rates were pretty high. And later, I worked at the Department of Labor for a few years on welfare reform, but also youth issues. Of course, at the Labor Department, there are a lot of programs that were aimed at young people who were having difficulty in the labor market, but subsequently I came to feel that those programs were really marginal to the overall system. That I co-authored a piece that was part of The Forgotten, Half the idea that a lot of people who don't go and complete a four year degree weren't doing nearly as well, and the government spent so much more on BA level people, so I was looking for some things that would help mainstream young people enter the labor force, and that's when I started learning more about the European systems, especially Germany and Switzerland. That culminated in some work that I did in the late 1980s with an article called The Compelling case for Youth Apprenticeship in 1990 and part of the movement that came about from commissions and research and just a general recognition that we needed a better system to help young people enter careers. We were successful, in a way, because George H.W. Bush proposed the National Youth Apprenticeship Act of 1992 and Bill Clinton liked apprenticeship, who followed him, but the new bill that came out of the Clinton administration barely mentioned apprenticeship. It was called the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, and it really involved very thin interventions for the many instead of intensive and thick interventions for the group I was concerned about, and ultimately that project sort of faded out. There was a sunset provision in the legislation, and it wasn't renewed. But I kept at it because I didn't see a better way than apprenticeship. I will say one other thing, which is, having worked in a factory, I came to believe that… I came to the realization that a lot of what we might call unskilled work, and machine operators didn't have to be unskilled. That the best...
