DOL Puts Millions of Dollars Toward Apprenticeships

Clark University received a welcome influx of funds from the U.S. Department of Labor last week: $27 million to grow apprenticeships. The Massachusetts university plans to invest the money in its new TechImpact project, an effort to expand apprenticeships in the information technology industry.

Clark was among five recipients awarded a total of about $162 million in government funds over four years to support registered apprenticeships.

The move reflects the Trump administration’s commitment to bolstering the workforce by promoting learn-and-earn initiatives, after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last year setting a goal to reach at least one million new active apprentices.

“President Trump challenged us to expand Registered Apprenticeship programs that deliver real results for American workers and businesses, and that is exactly what this program does,” Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said in a news release. “We are putting taxpayer dollars to work where they matter most, creating real jobs, real skills, and real opportunities in the industries that will define America’s future economic competitiveness.”

The funding is part of the administration’s new Pay-for-Performance Incentive Payments Program, which provides performance-based funds to grow apprenticeships in priority industries.

As a part of the model, award recipients have to give 85 percent of the funds away to employers sponsoring apprenticeships as an incentive for expanding programs and helping apprentices reach certain milestones. They have up to $6,000 to dole out to employers per new apprentice as programs grow.

The shift toward an incentive model has been a long time in the making, said John Ladd, senior adviser in the Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning at Jobs for the Future, an organization focused on education and the workforce, which is one of the award recipients.

A decade ago, apprenticeship wasn’t widespread, according to Ladd, who formerly served as administrator for the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship. The question at the time, he said, was “how do we get more employers, more intermediaries, more educational organizations engaged in apprenticeship?” But, he said, the hope was always to work toward pay-for-performance models once the apprenticeship landscape grew more robust, so the policy signals a turning point.

“This approach is an effort to move away from bigger grants to a smaller number of entities to spreading that funding out” now that “the ecosystem has evolved and matured a bit more and there are more players,” Ladd said. “This was coming and makes sense given where we are at this point in time.”

Where the Money Is Going

The five recipients of the Pay-for-Performance awards are working in different industries to incentivize employers to bring on thousands of new apprentices.

Clark University has set aside $23 million of its award to go directly to IT employers nationwide in the hopes that they’ll add 3,800 new apprentices. For each new apprentice they bring on, sponsors will receive $6,000 as soon as the apprentice reaches the 90-day mark of their program. The rest of Clark’s funding will go toward staffing and administrative costs.

“The federal government really wanted to have evidence that we were expanding apprenticeships,” said John LaBrie, Clark University’s associate provost and dean of graduate studies. “But if we find organizations and companies that want to host new apprenticeships … we will absolutely bring them into the fold.”

LaBrie said the funding builds on work the university has been doing since 2019, when it started an IT pre-apprenticeship program.

Apprenticeships create workforce pathways for “individuals who, candidly, may or may not ever enter a traditional university,” he said. The new funding “really opens up a new area where we can really start building on apprenticeships in more sophisticated industries and more technologically complicated industries.”

The ASE Educational Foundation, which focuses on auto repair training, plans to use its $25 million award to expand registered apprenticeships for auto, collision and truck service technicians.

The foundation will pay employers $3,500 for every apprentice they bring on, divided into two payments: one at the 90-day mark of their program, and the other after 270 days. The goal is to produce 6,000 new apprentices in the field and reach partners in all 50 states and across the industry, including car dealerships, body shops and auto repair shops.

“Every driver on the road depends on a skilled technician they may never meet,” Mike Coley, president of the ASE Education Foundation, said in a news release. This funding “lets us do something the industry has needed for a long time: open a clear, paid path into the trade, and give employers a proven way to invest in and grow the people who keep this country moving.”

The Department of Labor also awarded $29.9 million to the Wireless Infrastructure Association to increase the number of telecommunications apprentices. The association is already the national sponsor of the Telecommunications Industry Registered Apprenticeship Program, or TIRAP, which includes a range of employers and 16 different jobs in the industry, from underground and overhead utility installers to power technicians. Employers in and outside of the existing program will be able to participate in the association’s incentive structure of three payments: $2,100 when new apprentices reach 90 days, $2,100 when they complete the instruction portion of their apprenticeships and $1,800 when they finish their programs.

Deb Bennett, vice president of apprenticeship at the Wireless Infrastructure Association, said in her experience with TIRAP, these milestones can be particular “pain points” for employers, when it becomes hard to retain apprentices, so the association wanted to incentivize them to get past those challenges.

Her ultimate hope is that employers use the incentive money, and WIA’s administrative support, to “invest in their own programs,” she said. They can “identify maybe some new training courses they need or equipment that they need to support the training, that type of thing. It’s really putting that money back … supporting that related instruction and on-the-job experience for the apprentice.”

A whopping $40 million in Labor Department funds is slated for the Florida Department of Commerce, which plans to build its own incentive program through a consortium led by the State Workforce Board and CareerSource Florida, a workforce policy and investment board, according to the Department of Labor.

Their efforts will focus on growing apprenticeships in the defense industrial base, shipbuilding and maritime manufacturing industries. Further details about the program will be released soon, according to a news release from the state commerce department.

Florida is “uniquely positioned to support our nation’s efforts to develop the high-skill talent across these critical industries—bolstering job growth while supporting our national defense” as “home to 16 deepwater seaports and 21 major military installations,” Florida Secretary of Commerce J. Alex Kelly wrote in the release.

Jobs for the Future also secured $40 million to build out apprenticeships that support infrastructure for the artificial intelligence, semiconductor and nuclear energy industries.

The organization plans to dole out $6,000 incentives to employers, broken into two payments when apprentices hit 90 days and then a full year in the program. The plan is to support 6,250 new apprentices involved in the building and maintenance of AI data centers, nuclear energy facilities and semiconductor fabrication facilities, engaging sponsors in at least 45 states.

Ladd said the model will face some challenges, especially because the program’s requirement that recipients use 85 percent of the money on employer incentives leaves little funding left over for technical assistance and support for them. But Jobs for the Future plans to refer employers to partner organizations that can provide those services.

He also noted that the total $162 million the DOL invested in the Pay-for-Performance program, while a sizable sum, can likely only support between 30,000 and 50,000 new apprentices—far short of Trump’s goal of a million.

Still, “I hope it will demonstrate that this model can work,” Ladd said, “and it warrants additional funding.”