Insuring the Future

Pinnacol Assurance runs one of the only youth apprenticeships in the U.S. insurance industry, meant to attract new talent and develop homegrown tech skills. Also, sectoral training providers experiment with text-based coaching, and South Carolina and Tennessee share why and how they’re tracking noncredit outcomes.

Apprenticing for Tomorrow’s Jobs

Pinnacol Assurance started its apprenticeship program eight years ago—long before ChatGPT debuted or the pandemic upended the geography of work. At the time, one of the biggest challenges facing the Denver-based workers’ compensation insurer was a rapidly aging workforce.

It still is. If anything, the rise of generative AI and the wave of COVID-fueled retirements have only exacerbated the company’s—and the whole insurance industry’s—demographic challenges. With gen AI, for example, insurance underwriters and claims clerks are among the workers most vulnerable to having their work automated. That’s especially true for those handling the most straightforward kinds of cases, like auto claims.

The Big Idea: But the industry still faces a massive labor shortage. And as the role of basic underwriting potentially shrinks over time, industry experts say the need for specialists to handle more complex cases and for tech-savvy workers of all kinds only grows. Pinnacol’s apprenticeship program—with 17 active apprentices in a wide range of roles—is designed to evolve alongside the company’s labor needs.

“We just grew our own AI data scientist,” says Julie Wilmes, the apprenticeship program manager.

It would have been hard to compete on the open market. Brent Parton, president of the intermediary CareerWise, says that’s the beauty of apprenticeship at this moment. For years, the apprenticeship market has been struggling to catch up to industry, pushing beyond the trades into tech, financial services, and other “new-collar” fields.

Now, apprenticeship programs have the opportunity to develop AI-related training at the same time as companies are figuring out how the tech will change their jobs. And apprenticeship, Parton says, is uniquely suited to the on-the-job experimentation that emerging technologies demand.

“It’s building alongside industry for the first time in decades instead of trying to catch up to the world around it,” he says.

The Model: Some other insurance and professional services firms, like AON and Zurich NA, also are investing heavily in apprenticeship programs. Zurich recently expanded its program to offer a bachelor’s apprenticeship degree in partnership with the University of Arizona Global Campus, and both it and AON are founding partners in the Chicago Apprentice Network. Pinnacol looked at both companies as models for its program, which is broader than tech roles and AI-related skills. But the apprentices at those companies don’t start in high school.

Given that difference, Pinnacol decided that the front end of its three-year apprenticeship program would be focused on teaching business essentials, making explicit the expectations, rhythms, and culture of office work. Apprentices start working on their teams—such as claims and underwriting, marketing, customer service, or software development—after the first month, but with a lot of support.

“This is how we close the gap between high school and being a professional,” Wilmes says.  

The Details: It’s an all-in approach, with two full-time staff, that requires substantial buy-in and resources. Pinnacol had to cut back on the number of apprentices—it started with 23 in 2017—as costs rose significantly alongside the state’s minimum wage. But company officials point to data showing that its investment continues to pay off, in part because the program evolves with the market. (Get the full story, including interviews with apprentices themselves, over at Work Shift.)

Across the lifetime of the program, a quarter of apprentices have moved into full-time roles at Pinnacol, and that rate has been closer to half of the graduates in the last two years. Converting an apprentice to a full-time hire saves at least $4,500 in recruiting and onboarding costs and as much as $25K for hard-to-fill tech roles, company officials say.

The apprenticeship program isn’t just about the long game, though. Apprentices do work that, among other things, saves Pinnacol money on temporary hires and overtime. Last year, apprentices took on overflow work and covered for family leave for seven full-time employees. 

The program also has “a ripple effect on other employees,” with an estimated six figures in savings over time because of higher retention, says Mindy Carrothers, marketing and communications manager for the firm. And employees who supervise the apprentices are more likely to advance with the company, with 50% seeing a promotion within three years of managing one of the young workers.

Durable Skills: Getting those results takes constant improvement. The focus of late has been on improving communication and customer service, skills that are critical in just about every role at the company and are likely to stay that way.

“It’s not easy—let’s not sugarcoat it,” says Wilmes. “You’re taking high schoolers who have never had a job before and you’re trying to put them with customers, who are either business owners or injured workers. With business owners, you’re talking about their money; with injured workers, it’s pain and suffering.”

Navigating that takes both poise and empathy. That’s hard to teach. 

So Wilmes now has first-year apprentices regularly volunteer at Metro Caring, a community organization, where they help run a food bank and assist people with applying for state IDs. The experience has helped the apprentices—even the self-described “really antisocial” one—get used to regularly interacting with strangers and helping them navigate stressful or confusing situations. 

“We saw an incredible amount of growth,” Wilmes says.

The Kicker: She says that will pay dividends for years to come. “Yeah, there are challenges, and other businesses may say, ‘That’s a lot to take on,’” Wilmes says. “But there’s opportunity in that challenge.” —By Elyse Ashburn

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On-Demand Career Coaching

Text-based nudges have become a popular student success tool in higher education. Now coaching via text is coming to sectoral training programs, with an experiment aimed at alumni—many of whom work in frontline jobs.

The partnership features Empower Work, which offers text-based wraparound coaching, and several major training providers, including NPower, Per Scholas, SkillUp Coalition, Year Up United, and Memorial Assistance Ministries. The two-year project, which began last fall, will test how Empower Work can improve outcomes for graduates of those workforce programs.

Empower Work has seen a sharp increase in anxiety about jobs in its text chats with workers. Almost half of those conversations in January were about job loss, says Jaime-Alexis Fowler, the group’s founder and executive director. Another 20% were about searching for jobs.

“A sense of stress and stuckness” is at the heart of what most people reach out about, she says. Common issues include the “anxiety of how to pay bills or find a next role after a job loss, or the uncertainty of how to negotiate moving from a contract to a full-time role, or the toll of dealing with a toxic manager.”

So far in the pilot, similar issues have emerged with graduates of sectoral training programs. The goal of Empower Work’s text-based support is to lift participants’ emotional and economic well-being. Fowler says workers who connect with the text line typically see a 25% boost in economic security—an average gain of roughly $10K.

The group anticipates high uptake in the project. It set an initial benchmark goal of 30% of alumni tapping the technology during the two-year period.

“The question is at what points in their work experiences do they need the most help?” asks Fowler.

Several of the participating training groups, including NPower and Per Scholas, have bulked up their assistance for alumni and are focusing more on career success. For example, Per Scholas is investing in upskilling programs for graduates in areas such as cloud computing, network management, and project management.

The pilot with Empower Work is being funded by the Truist and GitLab Foundations. One of the questions it seeks to answer is how much it would cost to offer text-based help to every U.S. workforce organization.

The Kicker: “What’s powerful about our model is that it’s scalable,” Fowler says. “We can serve millions of people leveraging the power of people that focus on human connection and coaching and technology.”

The Real Deal

Open Tabs

Clean Energy Workforce
A group of 21 House Republicans is calling for the preservation of Biden-era clean energy tax credits. They argued for an “all-of-the-above energy approach, combined with a robust advanced manufacturing sector” in a recent letter. The Trump administration has talked about repealing clean energy investments under the Inflation Reduction Act, most of which have gone to Republican districts. Many in workforce education worry that those subsidies will be cut.

Electronics Manufacturing
More than 10% of U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is in electronics, with circuit boards, semiconductors, and wiring harnesses crossing the border multiple times before final assembly, according to IPC, an electronics manufacturing trade group. Tariffs will raise costs and drive U.S. electronics production offshore, IPC says. The group aims to create career pathways—including apprenticeships and credentials—for 120K people per year.

Healthcare Careers
The number of healthcare jobs in the U.S. nearly doubled over the past 30 years, overtaking manufacturing and retail in 2009 to become the largest industry, finds a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Earnings for healthcare workers overall have risen nearly twice as fast as those in other industries. Yet with some exceptions, regions have not been able to replace manufacturing job losses with healthcare roles.

Jobs and Gen AI
As more sophisticated AI agents become available, including deep research tools, journalists and experts increasingly are raising concerns about potential job losses. Some of the most compelling warnings are coming from the heads of AI labs, not from political, civil, society, or academic leaders, writes the Brookings Institution’s Molly Kinder. Her hunch is that too few of these decision-makers themselves are experimenting with cutting-edge AI.

AI Skills
Nearly one in four U.S. tech jobs posted this year are seeking employees with AI skills, and 36% of IT jobs posted in January were AI-related, Nate Rattner reports for The Wall Street Journal, citing data from an AI job tracker run by the University of Maryland at College Park, in partnership with LinkUp and Outrigger Group. The tracker seeks to map where AI jobs are being created, in part by using a fine-tuned large language model to differentiate jobs requiring AI skills from others.

Maturing LERs
Developers of digital wallets for learning and employment have matured their products, with meaningful advances that have given individuals the ability to control, access, and retain the privacy of their skills data, finds a report from Jobs for the Future. For example, the report says the Digital Credentials Consortium has built an open-source infrastructure to empower learners to securely share academic credentials across institutions and employers.

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