Apprentices Need Expert Eye. So Does Trump’s Plan for Them.
Date Posted: September 29, 2017
Posted In: Ideas, Workforce,
From The New York Times: Last December, Destina Garcia found herself outside a locked front door in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. Somewhere on the other side was an older man who needed her help.
She didn’t know yet that he had terminal cancer. She hadn’t met his estranged daughter, the one she would eventually bring north to spend the final days at her father’s side.
At that moment, Ms. Garcia was only a few weeks into a brand-new and also very old kind of job, one being modernized to help fix the broken American system of education, training and employment. She had just begun work as an apprentice.
President Trump has started a debate about whether it’s possible to vastly expand the number of apprenticeships nationwide without losing the elements that make them work best.
Ms. Garcia, who is 30, grew up in the Manhattanville Houses project in West Harlem and had a son at 18. She found entry-level work coding medical records. But she soon ran into a quandary: While most good jobs require some kind of credential, going to college can be expensive and time-consuming. Even if you finish, there’s no guarantee of employment.
She picked up certificates as a certified nurse assistant and an emergency medical technician, but neither led to permanent work — perhaps because in those fields, as in most, employers value skills that can be learned only on the job. But how do you get a job without the skills?
Then Ms. Garcia got connected to a new program jointly sponsored by Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, the New York Alliance for Careers in Health Care, LaGuardia Community College and the nation’s largest health care workers union, 1199 S.E.I.U. Using apprenticeships, the program trains people to become community health workers.
Apprenticeships have been around for ages. Ben Franklin and Paul Revere were apprentices. Since the Industrial Revolution, apprenticeship in America has been concentrated in areas like plumbing, welding and ironwork: male-dominated, blue-collar trades.
But the real growth in today’s job market is in fields like health care and technology. The number of community health workers, who connect vulnerable people to the medical and social service systems, increased to 51,900 in 2016 from 38,000 in 2013.