Why make apprenticeship simpler? Part 2: Regulation

Building off our previous post explaining Why make apprenticeship simpler - a multipart agreement, let's take a look at the next thing that makes apprenticeship complicated. Regulation.

Why regulation?

Let's first cover why apprenticeships are regulated. Apprenticeships are regulated for many reasons -- safety, equity, etc. -- but for first, we're focused on the core. Apprenticeship needs to mean something beyond the apprenticeship's walls. Here, we can use colleges as an example. Colleges are accredited so that degrees mean the same thing to everyone. There's an accrediting body that ensures consistency. A bachelors degree from any institution means you took a certain amount of credits and hit a certain depth of your subject area.

We don't have to guess what a bachelors degree means -- it's roughly 4 years of study thanks to this standardization.

Apprenticeships are the same. Regulating apprenticeships means an apprenticeship certificate for a utility line workers means roughly the same level of training in Texas as in New Hampshire. That transferrability matters.

Regulating requires standardization

So, now we need to regulate to ensure transferrability and standardization, which means we need to force programs to reach the same minimal standards.

How are those standards even defined? Typically, this involves surveying the amorphous "industry" for what would constitute a sufficient level of training for the occupation involved. Can someone become a machinist in 2 years or 4 years? How many hours of on-the-job-training (OJT) do they need to spend on Drills? Lathes? Welding? The first apprenticeship program that defines this typically has a lot of influence over what's considered standard, but ideally, more are surveyed as part of this process.

Once established, every other machinist apprenticeship program must meet the same level of OJT. What about classes? Which classes and how many years of classes do they need to take? How about wage increases?

All of these questions (and many more) are asked and answered as part of standardizing each and every apprenticeable occupation.

Regulation requires protection

Remember that multipart agreement? Of the three entities, the apprentice has the least power of any other body in that agreement. They're at the whims of employers, schools, and other organizations. Regulation helps project apprentices in this agreement.

Regulation ensures that applicants cannot be discriminated against. Regulation ensures that, as the apprentice holds up their end of the agreement, they'll be rewarded with increases in their salary.

Regulation ensures that an apprentice is exactly in a situation that they can be trained, with a certain ratio of apprentices to journeyworkers, so they're not in situations where 100 apprentices are "trained" by a single journeyworker.

Regulation requires auditing

Many of these regulations are enforced most substantially at the apprenticeships' inception. When the apprenticeship is registered with a state or federal apprenticeship agency, an apprenticeship training representative (ATR) from the agency will have a checklist of things your apprenticeship standards must meet -- EEO clauses, mentor ratios, total hours of OJT or classroom time.

But regulation requires follow up. Anyone can put something down on paper and just ignore it later.

So, apprenticeship agencies now need to be able to audit your program to make sure you're doing what you said you would be doing. This typically occurs after the first year of being an apprenticeship and then every few years after that. Your ATR will randomly want to pull files on different apprentices to make sure you're meeting that standard that industry defined and you agreed to when forming your program.

If you're going to be audited, now you need a good way of reporting! You should want this anyways to run a great program, but now you legitimately need it to continue to be an apprenticeship program

Multipart agreement + regulation

There's solid reasons for every bit of the above regulation, and a lot more that's not even sniffed at here.

There absolutely needs to be standards to ensure an apprenticeship certification means something. There needs to regulations around hiring to provide equitable opportunity for all. There needs to be a bar for how apprentices are trained, how they're assessed, and what they need to do in order to grow the amount on their paycheck. And finally, there needs to be reporting to enforce all of this.

Before we've done a single thing, we have a complicated three-way agreement with regulations for every moving part.

And this, again, is why it is our mission to use technology to make any part of this whole equation simpler.