Room to Grow

Measuring the Potential of Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships have bipartisan support as a promising alternative to bring young people into the workforce, but they are still only a tiny fraction of total job openings in the United States. In this report, co-authored with the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School, we assess the potential to expand this approach.

Apprenticeships are much more common in Europe than the United States. There has been considerable discussion about expanding this option into new fields, but no comprehensive assessment of the opportunities. To find answers, we examined the skills demanded in job postings for more than 23 million openings in 2016. We identified the underlying skills in apprenticeship roles and looked for similarities in other positions. We found, based on this skills analysis, that there is significant opportunity to expand apprenticeships in the United States:

Based on analysis of the Burning Glass database of job postings, we found:

• The number of occupations using apprenticeships could be expanded from 27 to 74;
• The number of job openings filled by apprentices could grow from 410,000 to roughly 3.3 million;
• Many of these new fields pay more than current apprenticeship occupations, with up to a $20,000 salary premium; and,
• Many of these occupations are difficult for employers to fill using current channels.

Most existing apprenticeships are concentrated in skilled trades, such as carpenters, glaziers, and sheet metal workers. The study identified two other kinds of roles that could also use this training approach:

• Expander roles, 21 jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, such as shipping clerks, solar photovoltaic installers, and tax preparers.
• Booster roles, which include jobs where employers often request a bachelor’s degree, even though the skills needed don’t require a college education. These 26 occupations include claims adjusters, human resource specialists, computer user support specialists, and database administrators.

This is not to say that significant barriers to expanding apprenticeships do not exist—they do. But this analysis shows that there is significant unrealized potential in the apprenticeship field. Armed with this data, employers, educators, and policymakers can pursue a targeted strategy for expanding apprenticeships into more occupations, especially those areas where they see a shortage of middle skills talent.

Occupations That Could Be Filled by Apprenticeships

These occupations have common characteristics with current apprenticeship occupations, and potentially could also be filled using the apprenticeship approach. Booster roles are those which sometimes, but not always, request a bachelor’s degree.