There is widespread support for expanding apprenticeships in the United States, but employer participation remains stubbornly low, especially in industries where apprenticeships are uncommon. This isn’t for lack of trying; intermediaries and technical assistance providers have developed workarounds, states and the federal government have launched initiatives and grants, and funders have supported pilot programs and communities of practice. But it’s not enough.
Our research, including interviews with 14 experts and nine employers, suggests that minor tweaks to the U.S. apprenticeship system won’t be sufficient to scale it across many industries and occupations. Although employers consistently get a positive return on investment from apprenticeships eventually, the barriers for them to get started are high and largely rooted in system design and misconceptions about what apprenticeships are.
Apprenticeships are front-loaded with costs, and the benefits tend to accrue over three to five years. Employers commonly perceive the administrative process for registering apprenticeships as onerous, and confusion about what apprenticeships actually are makes the decisionmaking process challenging and inefficient for them. To scale participation, policymakers need to make structural changes—lowering the barriers without sacrificing rigor and quality.
Apprenticeships’ front-loaded cost problem
When trying to start an apprenticeship program for the first time, many employers immediately encounter substantial startup costs and a steep learning curve. In our interviews, one employer told us, “The [upfront] costs are really in…the time it takes to develop a program. So, we talk oftentimes about how you need to anchor this program to business need.”
This employer estimated that it takes about six months to get an apprenticeship program off the ground, just doing the program design work: developing the structure, coordinating with education providers, building assessment frameworks, establishing supervisor training, navigating compliance, and integrating with human resources systems.
A large pharmaceutical employer put it more bluntly: “A business exists to make money, not to train people. Let’s just oversimplify it. I’m built to make medicine. I’m not built to do all this training, right? So, in order to develop any of this stuff…it’s going to take an investment of somebody’s time to go do that, which is not core to what I do as my business.”
This employer was wrestling with a lot of design questions, such as what to pay apprentices, whether to work with an intermediary to be the employer of record or pay them directly, how to integrate them into human resources, how to track training records for Food and Drug Administration compliance, how to leverage the learning management system, how to organize supervision, and more.
Once an apprenticeship program does start up, wages are by far the most significant cost, followed by a supervisor’s time requirement. So, in the beginning of a program when productivity is lowest, the program will seem very cost-heavy. This front-loaded nature of apprenticeships isn’t something an employer can eliminate, but research shows that the benefits of apprenticeships consistently outweigh the costs for employers over the long term. One of the biggest challenges is how to enable small and medium-sized employers to overcome these high startup costs in ways that don’t sacrifice quality and rigor.
High administrative burdens increase barriers to starting apprenticeship programs
The current apprenticeship system multiplies front-loaded costs with administrative complexity, since the U.S. system tends to register apprenticeship programs one-by-one in a bespoke manner. This enables high levels of customization, but few economies of scale—and often a long wait for approval. Although allowing employers to develop customized programs may seem “employer-friendly,” it puts the design burden on employers (or their intermediary partners), assumes they know how to design apprenticeships well, and makes participation difficult for small employers who lack time or capabilities.
High variation also means each program needs individualized attention from states or the federal government, making compliance and quality assurance more costly and complicated. Too much customization has become a problem, under the guise of being an employer-friendly solution.
The pharmaceutical employer described how basic questions become complex, such as how to integrate apprentices into existing human resources systems: “There’s just a whole lot of things that I think still need to be worked through and figured out, and I think the state has to figure out how to make it easier on companies to make it happen, because otherwise we’ll opt out.”
These are challenges that every employer must sort out individually because there is so much variation from one employer to another in terms of skill needs, size, culture, capacity, and more. It takes each of them time, resources, and patience to work out all the kinks.
The confusion that undermines everything
Without national definitions and competency standards for apprenticeships (or for work-based learning in general), employers face profound confusion about what “apprenticeship” actually means and how it fits into existing talent strategies.
In our conversations, no two employers said the same thing when they were asked what apprenticeship meant to them. Their responses ranged from a highly structured 12-month registered program, to a multiyear earn-and-learn pathway integrated with a degree, to an extended internship-like arrangement, to informal mentorship with on-the-job training.
Employers juggle multiple talent strategies: university recruiting, internships, temp agencies, internal promotion, tuition reimbursement, and more. Where does apprenticeship fit? How is it different? Most employers don’t know.
This confusion prevents learning from peers, benchmarking progress, or understanding basic expectations. How long should apprenticeship programs be? What’s the right classroom-to-workplace ratio? Is registration necessary? What competencies should apprentices master? What talent challenges are apprenticeships most suited to solve?
Without clear models, every employer starts from scratch.
Shared infrastructure can simplify apprenticeship startup
If U.S. policymakers, parents, students, employers, and workforce and education leaders want more employers to participate in the apprenticeship system, we need to redesign the startup experience. Employers shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel, and they shouldn’t have to choose between easy startup and quality programs.
This means building shared infrastructure, such as:
- Shared occupational frameworks: Pre-approved programs employers can adapt to meet their needs without jeopardizing quality, rather than creating them from scratch.
- Multi-employer/group sponsor models: Intermediaries working with employers in the same occupation can share costs, such as supervisor training, courses, and administrative costs. This especially benefits smaller employers.
- Authority to shape quality standards: Multi-employer intermediaries shaping learning milestones and competencies in partnership with educators, ensuring alignment of coursework with employer needs while teaching marketable skills to apprentices.
- Nationwide definitions for the work-based learning continuum: The cacophony of terms—internships, pre-apprenticeships, youth apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships, etc.—creates confusion. Policymakers should present these definitions as part of a unified system with different interconnected options, not competing models.
- Peer learning and rapid-cycle research on what works: Employers need information about optimal program design for their industry, realistic startup timelines, and how apprenticeships compare to other talent strategies.
Many intermediaries and policymakers think more customization, more support, and better recruitment messaging will solve the problem of low employer participation. But employers don’t have time to build programs from scratch, can’t figure out what apprenticeship means due to a lack of definitions and standards, and find timelines for registration too slow (typically six months to over two years). Shared infrastructure can fix many of these issues.
Making participation viable, not just possible
Employer participation will remain the apprenticeship system’s bottleneck until we make programs genuinely easier to start while ensuring they deliver high-quality training. The value proposition is real; employers who run mature programs tend to become enthusiastic advocates. But enthusiasm at year three doesn’t help employers stuck at month one.
The challenge is to close the gap between employers in the early stages of expressing interest in apprenticeships and those that have been hosting apprentices for years. Rather than approaching this one employer at a time, U.S. policymakers and intermediaries should start building shared infrastructure that lets employers offload costs for things that are not central to their mission and business model. This will free up their time to do what they do best: providing hands-on work-based learning opportunities, high-quality supervision, and insights into what they need related coursework to cover.
If we do that, more employers will participate in apprenticeships—not because we’ve convinced them, but because we’ve made participation viable.
This analysis draws on research from the report Building an evidence base for the business case for apprenticeships.
