Apprenticeships are headed off the shop floor and into the office

Once the domain of skilled tradespeople like mechanics, electricians, and plumbers, apprenticeships have been expanding their reach—and heading into the office.

Companies faced with a labor shortage and ambitious goals for diversifying their workforces are launching apprenticeship programs to hire and train up employees in cyber security, accounting, data analytics, design, business operations, and more—creating opportunities in high-paying, salaried roles for people who have neither industry experience nor a four-year degree.

In the United States, there are still more open jobs than there are people. “With very tight labor markets and lots of retirement of baby boomers, employers are struggling to recruit and retain folks,” says Annelies Goger, who studies apprenticeships and earn-and-learn models at Brookings. “There’s another interest from employers seeking DEI processes that work.”

More than 60% of adults in the US don’t have a four-year college degree. The percentage is higher for historically marginalized groups, including 83% of Latinx workers and 76% of Black workers, along with almost 70% of veterans. Offering a new route to white-collar work, like with an apprentice program, doesn’t just help companies hire more easily—but also more inclusively.

Like a trade apprenticeship, a white-collar apprenticeship is a full-time job. Participants earn a salary and benefits, get hands-on experience working in the field, and receive relevant classroom instruction, sometimes culminating in a degree. Most programs last eight months to a year, sometimes more, and the goal is a permanent position with the company training them.

For workers, the appeal is a shot at job training and a paid position without taking on student debt, and a low-risk way to try on a profession. It’s also an access point for entry-level roles that require work experience they’re missing. For some young people, apprenticeships are the way into fields like tech and accounting.

Career-switchers are signing up, too. Chant’e Boyd spent 18 years working in retail and restaurants. Although she had worked her way up into management, Boyd felt stuck. A career in accounting wasn’t on her radar until she joined Aon’s apprenticeship program in 2022. The professional services firm paid for her to get her associate’s degree while she got hands-on experience at the company. “I wasn’t tax savvy. I was not knowledgeable about computers, but they didn’t have anything like this when I was growing up, so this was a great opportunity, and I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want to pass this up,’” she tells Quartz. In September, she was hired for a permanent position as an investment consulting performance specialist, gathering and updating investment reports and performance guides for clients.

Office apprenticeships are catching on in the US. Verizon brought in its first cohort of 40 apprentices in 2019. In two years, the company has hired more than 70 of its participants into full-time roles—in functions like data analytics, full-stack development, and engineering—with a retention rate of 98%. The program has been so successful that in 2024, the company will multiply the program eightfold, bringing in 320 apprentices.

Tara Orlando, director of talent attraction and development at Verizon, says managers now approach her asking how they can get apprentices on their teams. “The impact [apprentices] are making is tremendous. We have enough data to say that this is a real solution for us,” she says.

Software company Intuit created its own apprenticeship program three years ago. Between 2021 and 2023, the company saw a 163% increase in applications. Iram Jamil, Intuit’s senior program manager of DEI in tech, attributes this to the success of its first cohort, 82% of whom were hired for full-time positions. She says the program attracts workers from a wider range of backgrounds, often underrepresented ones the company otherwise would not have found by its traditional methods. “Relying on a talent pipeline from a specific profile of students often limits the diversity of tech workforces,” says Jamil. “In other words, it’s difficult to achieve diversity in tech by solely relying on talent from four-year colleges.”

Apparel company VFC, which houses labels like Vans, The North Face, Supreme, and Timberland, runs two programs. One makes business apprentices out of its brands’ retail workers; the other recruits new designers from inside and outside the company. Design apprentices spend a year rotating across four of its brands (Vans, The North Face, Timberland, and Alta) around the world. And all apprentices are paid in the same band as entry-level recruits with four-year degrees.

“From day one, they’re contributing because in many cases, they’re our consumer,” says Lauren Guthrie, the company’s head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Everything they have coming in on day one is valuable.”

Some European countries have long deployed apprenticeships across industries. Take Germany for example, where more than half of high school graduates enter the workforce via apprenticeships. In the US, about 0.3% of the workforce is currently in a federally registered apprenticeship.

Jan Benedikt Metternich, who works in research and development at Germany-based chemicals manufacturer Evonik, started with the company as a lab tech apprentice while he was in college. After earning a PhD in organic chemistry in Germany and completing his postdoctoral research at Harvard University, he returned to Evonik.

Metternich attributes his apprenticeship, which are common for Germans working in life sciences, to equipping him for his career early. “You get the practical experience of working in a lab, and you get to know the industry. Whether you want to go down an academic track or an industrial track, you know what you’re getting yourself into,” says Metternich. “It prepared me very well for what was about to come. I was much better at working in a lab than most people around me, just because I had all this experience already.”

When employers can’t find the right candidates in the market, says Goger, they start creating talent pools themselves.

Even new hires with bachelor’s degrees need training. “One of the issues that companies are sharing with us is that the four-year graduates are not necessarily coming with the skills and abilities that they need on the job,” says Matthew Allen at the German American Chamber of Commerce, which helps US companies and German subsidiaries set up apprenticeship programs. “Someone who’s going to be useful in electromechanical skills needs to be able to program robots using the language of the human-machine interface that is on the company’s specific machines,” he says. Graduates come out with theoretical skills, but struggle with application.

“Apprenticeships are the answer to that, because they provide skills and experience to workers who don’t have them,” says Ryan Craig, author of Apprentice Nation: How the ‘Earn and Learn’ Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. Those aren’t just soft skills, but technical ones too, like coding languages, and the industry knowledge employers need. “You’re not hiring apprentices based on their skills or experience,” he adds. “You’re hiring them based on their potential.”

Companies also find that a onetime apprentice makes for a long-tenured employee. Turnover is very low. In many cases, getting access to skills training is reason enough for employees to stick around—although for some, job opportunities elsewhere are limited in a culture that still favors the four-year degree.

Apprenticeships are hard work for employers, too. Recruiting, training, and educating workers is cost- and labor-intensive. Few employers are set up to provide classroom-style components, and intermediaries that do provide that structure aren’t nearly as numerous as the companies that need them.

But to companies that want to build inclusive teams that people can spend their careers in, the investment is well-worth it. More than skill, the future workforce requires adaptability, agility, and a willingness to learn, says Verizon’s Orlando. “That’s what an apprenticeship model is all about. Leaders are seeing that in comparison to some of the talent they bring in through more traditional routes—not only [having] aptitude and skill, but the ability to pivot and be flexible and curious and hungry to learn that’s really baked into this experience,” she says. “That’s a huge differentiator.”