Sweetening the Deal

A strategic use of federal dollars for apprenticeships in Miami encourages companies to try earn-and-learn programs. Also, the latest on a possible AI-driven white-collar jobs apocalypse, and essays on Ohio’s new model for AI in education and on Arkansas’ nondegree playbook. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)

Hooking Businesses on Apprenticeship

In her home country of Ecuador, Claudia Moreta, 44, earned a bachelor’s degree in international trade and worked as a customs broker. In the United States, she became a stay-at-home mother. When she was ready to return to the workforce, Moreta set her sights on the logistics industry, but she had a hard time getting a job.

Then one day while browsing the internet, she came across an advertisement from Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. They were looking for apprentices.

“It was a very good time for me to grow as a professional,” Moreta says.

Three years later, she’s working on the export side of Hellmann and is working toward a master’s degree. She’s one of a growing number of apprentice graduates in South Florida, made possible by an especially close partnership between Miami Dade College and the local workforce board.

The Big Idea: Seven years ago, Miami Dade became the first higher education institution in the state to operate as an apprenticeship sponsor—one of a growing number of community colleges across the country taking on that role. The college now offers 22 apprenticeships across industries and, at any one time, has up to 150 apprentices across 45 different employers.

Miami Dade takes on the work of designing, teaching, and coordinating the programs—and it adds the sweetener of funds from the local workforce board, CareerSource South Florida, to reimburse up to 40% of apprentices’ wages with federal training funds. The workforce board is also submitting a request to the Department of Labor to be able to reimburse up to 100% of wages for businesses in Opportunity Zones, federally designated low-income areas.

It’s a strategic use of dollars from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act—and is particularly attractive to smaller companies that don’t have the financial resources to train apprentices. States like Alabama have also seen success with wage reimbursements. But apprenticeship leaders there, as in a number of places, have found WIOA dollars to be too restrictive for many employers.

In Miami, however, the majority of employers take the college and workforce board up on the offer.

A Tag-Team Approach

CareerSource South Florida has long worked with Miami Dade College on training initiatives, but the relationship has grown in recent years as apprenticeships expanded. Rick Beasley, executive director of the workforce board, often calls Alexia Rolle, dean of career and technical education at the college, when he’s out meeting with employers and sees an opportunity to introduce apprenticeships. 

“I call her and basically say, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing right now, but come join me because I need you to hear what they’re asking for,’” Beasley says. “It’s like a tag team in a wrestling match. I let her pitch, then she tags me in, and I say, ‘My dollars can help.’ That’s how we work together to help employers create an apprenticeship program.” 

In Miami-Dade County, 81% of businesses employ fewer than 10 workers. Despite the tight labor market in Miami and the need to recruit and retain skilled workers, these businesses often have a hard time establishing apprenticeship programs due to a lack of manpower. Apprenticeships can be a heavy lift for employers, requiring HR management, mentors, supervisors, and a financial investment to pay workers who are less productive in the beginning. 

Employers Bite: The support from the college and the workforce board helps lessen that burden. Bean Automotive, for example, turned to Miami Dade College to address an industry-wide talent shortage. Dealerships were constantly raiding each other for experienced employees, Beasley says, and Bean wanted to break that cycle.

The company has had three cohorts of apprentices thus far—bringing in people who don’t have experience but can develop it. “They’ve built their own talent pool,” Beasley says.

Miami Dade College doesn’t push employers to use the wage reimbursement, but about 70% go for it, including Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. With about 150 employees in Miami, the company approached the college in 2020 to ask for help in developing a talent pipeline, specifically through apprenticeship. 

“We wanted to get people that we can train, so that by the time we have open roles, we have people who can fill them, who are cross trained and have the right skill set already. We don’t need to start from scratch,” says Priscila Rodriguez, regional learning and development manager at Hellmann.

Out of the six students who have completed their apprenticeships so far, five have stayed with the company.

The experience has shown what’s possible for companies, large and small, when they get an assist. —By Colleen Connolly

Read the full article on Work Shift.

AI and the Jobs of the Future

Several corporate CEOs have joined AI lab leaders in predicting a white-collar jobs apocalypse. Yet without firm data on AI’s emerging impacts on the labor market, experts remain at odds over what to expect during the next few years.

Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, echoed a particularly aggressive (and potentially self-serving) recent forecast from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Farley said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “What are we going to do as a society for the people that it leaves behind?”

Less sweeping AI-related job warnings also have come from leaders at JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, and Microsoft, which laid off 15K workers—or roughly 9% of its workforce—in recent months. Likewise, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the technology is handling 30% to 50% of the company’s workload.

Questioning Motives: CEOs may be trying to set expectations by using AI predictions as cover for future workforce cuts, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale School of Management, told Axios’s Emily Peck. They get to look more transparent and not shock employees with layoffs.

Meanwhile, economic uncertainty has slowed the pace of hiring and created a stagnant labor market. Workers with a job are likely to stay employed, but those without one probably will stay unemployed.

Signs of economic weakness, like long-term unemployment, are more complicated than an AI-powered dystopia, Joe Wilkins writes for Futurism: “What gets presented as proof of AI’s automation potential is instead a mash of penny-pinching layoffs, outsourcing, labor market saturation, and in some cases, employer bias against recent college grads.”

Augmentation vs. Replacement: What’s clear is that a rapidly increasing share of U.S. workers are using AI regularly in their jobs—primarily in white-collar roles. Some pundits and experts remain hopeful that the tech can mostly augment those jobs rather than replace them. 

For example, David Autor, an MIT labor economist, struck an optimistic note last week, saying that AI could help people develop and deepen their existing expertise, better outfitting them for the jobs of the future. 

AI also is poised to support frontline workers in retail, construction, logistics, and other industries, writes Enzo Cavalie, a principal at Reach Capital, particularly when paired with multimodal interphases like voice and computer vision. For example, Cavalie says AI copilots can provide on-the-job support that time-pressed managers often can’t.

When projecting potential job displacement, economists and other experts who study AI often draw different conclusions about which employees face the most risk, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times. Some argue that AI is most likely to affect entry-level workers. Others say experienced workers ultimately will be more vulnerable while novice employees are likely to benefit from the technology.

More Research: A growing number of projects seek to advance understanding of the impact of AI on workers and the labor market.

For example, Carnegie Mellon University and MIT are leading a newly launched effort to build an Observatory for U.S. Job Disruption. Also participating are the University of Pittsburgh, Northeastern University, the University of Virginia, the California Policy Lab, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. The consortium plans to study each state’s unemployment insurance program to calculate workers’ unemployment risk based on their role in their local economy.

Anthropic also recently announced the Economic Futures Program, an attempt to better understand the economic impacts of AI systems and to craft sound policy responses. Through the program, Anthropic will offer up to 50 grants between $10K and $50K for empirical research that can be completed within six months. 

Retraining and Skills: Ford’s Farley is among many who are calling for ambitious public-private strategies to retrain displaced workers as AI drives economic transformation. “Our governments have to get really serious about investing in trade schools and skilled trades,” he said.

A wide range of observers think AI can be part of the solution by powering a move toward skills-first hiring and advancement.

For example, Opportunity@Work’s Papia Debroy and Byron Auguste argue that the tech can enable workers to pivot more easily across tasks amid shifting job demands. “We should direct AI technologies to observe and understand workers’ skills and replicate skills-based pathways to accelerate the tearing of the paper ceiling,” they write for the Brookings Institution. 

Much of the interesting work in HR tech is focused on how to identify durable skills in workers, says Rebecca Wetteman, CEO of Valoir, a technology research firm. “How do we on the front end have a better understanding of where skills are and where our gaps are,” she says, “so that we're actually hiring not just to fill gaps, but to build out complementary teams in organizations?”

However, most companies remain stuck in the early stages of this work, Valoir has found. 

The technology is there, says Wetteman, an advisor to major tech companies. But the emotional and behavioral muscle isn’t. A key challenge, she says, is that a skills-based approach that shows employees a clear path to better jobs can be threatening to a traditional HR department.

AI is increasing the urgency for CEOs to get this right, she says, so companies can cost-effectively upskill and reskill while preventing human capital from walking out the door.

For example, Wetteman says, a bank might not need 20 tellers anymore, but they might need financial counselors with a high degree of empathy. Yet employers can only redeploy workers to other, higher-value roles if they truly understand the skills needed for that work. They also must be able to identify workers with adjacent skills who can be trained for those jobs.

The Kicker: “Organizations that see the bridge between skills and effectively leveraging AI are going to be in a really good spot,” she says. “The ones that have done the most are the ones that have the most to lose.”

The Real Deal

Open Tabs

Youth Apprenticeship
Attracting employers is the biggest challenge to expanding youth apprenticeships in Elkhart County, Indiana, and beyond, Kavitha Cardoza writes for The Hechinger Report. Elkhart is at the forefront of the state’s push to create 50K apprenticeships for high school students by 2034. Yet just 28 employers have partnered with Elkhart school districts this coming school year—enough to employ about a third of the interested students.

Employer Connections
The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation announced $13M in new funding for Indiana’s statewide apprenticeship initiative. The foundation, which has played a central role in the coalition leading the state’s youth apprenticeship work, is funding the new Indiana Career Apprenticeship Pathway. The new money will support the development of statewide employer groups and an infrastructure to help intermediaries work with employers, schools, and students.

Durable Skills
Job market competitiveness now hinges on a dual emphasis on technical and durable skills, particularly AI literacy combined with human capabilities like creativity and communication, ETS finds in a global report. A strong majority of survey respondents (83%) agreed that upskilling and reskilling will become the new standard for people throughout their careers, with 78% of employees saying they are interested in a digital skills credentials wallet.

ROI of Rapid Certificates
Short-term college certificates that require six credits or fewer have similar labor market returns to longer but still short-term certificates (7 to 15 or 16 to 36 credits) in the first few years, according to research based on data from two-year colleges in Kentucky. The “rapid certificates” also boost major-to-industry job alignment. However, while they yield the greatest immediate earnings and employment gains, the benefits begin to fade within a few quarters.

Event and Network
Stand Together, Western Governors University, and Common Group announced the second annual Human Potential Summit, which will be held in Utah this November. The event’s leaders plan to bring business leaders together with workforce and education innovators. At the summit, they will launch a new year-round network for business and talent strategy leaders, with a goal of helping companies transform employee recruitment, development, and retention.

Thanks for reading. To support our work, donate here. And if this newsletter was forwarded to you, subscribe here. —PF