The trades are facing a workforce shortage, with employers struggling to find the skilled workers they need. At the Apprenticeship Works event in Florida, Trade Hounds VP of Marketing Jeanette Abrahamsen spoke with Natasha Sherwood, Workforce Development Director at IEC (Independent Electrical Contractors), about how apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs can help address the gap.
In this Q&A, Sherwood discusses apprenticeship funding, the role of AI in training, and IEC's approach to preparing people for careers in the electrical trades.
This was a regional convening of all of our career sources in this region. Career sources in Florida are broken up by different sector and region areas, and four of them came together to put together this event to talk about how industry could integrate apprenticeship into their programs and their employment.
What they did was bring in different individuals, employers, or associations like IEC to talk about why and how to do this. We got the opportunity to network with individuals, talk to actual apprentices who’ve been through the program, and talk about why we do what we do.
It was really just celebrating what apprenticeship is and encouraging a few more people to try it, talk about it, and really see where it’s going.
The $145 million is based on a Pay for Performance grant. It’ll be awarded to five different organizations across four sector industries, plus one open industry.
This is really exactly what it says: pay for performance. Sponsors of the program, like an IEC chapter, after they complete a certain amount of days, would be able to receive a certain amount of funds to reimburse them.
The idea is to get people enrolled and then offset some of those costs, because the sponsors and employers are bearing a lot of that burden. In many states, they’re paying for the tuition, they’re paying the wages, they’re paying the journeyman who’s mentoring that person.
So, it’s about taking that burden off.
Other grants that have come out were state improvement grants for states to improve and advance their apprenticeship programs.
Then there was a restart grant, which is super exciting. It’s a restart for those with second chances, for justice-impacted situations.
And then, just recently, an AI grant. So, there is a request for proposals, RFP, to integrate AI into the apprenticeship world, whether that’s actual occupations in AI, but also to implement AI into regular apprenticeship programs, to make it part of the learning process.
We know it’s not to replace an electrician, but we know AI can be used by electricians. So, that’s going to be a little bit of a change, but we’re already implementing it in our pre-apprentice program. We partnered with an organization called Pace AI.
Pace AI runs alongside our curriculum, ingests it, and scaffolds it down to low-level readers, so someone who maybe didn’t do well at reading or math can now complete the program. It also translates it into 250 different languages, so they’re learning electrical, but they’re also learning English along the way.
What the industry was telling us is that they are so busy, they need people so much, they can’t hire. You need to hire, but they’re so busy they can’t take someone off the job to train other people. They need people with more skills.
So I started thinking, we have applicants that aren’t getting hired, they need them, what do we need to do? Let’s build that next bridge.
We took a pre-apprentice book and we started using our learning management system. We dropped the book in there digitally. We then dropped Pace AI into it next and ingested it. When you run it, it’s specific to the individual user. much like ChatGPT, it’s yours and it learns you.
Then we were able to video it, which allowed us to make this barrier-breaking program that can be delivered in every possible format. Translation available in 250 different languages, scaffolded down to GED-level learners.
We have students who will be able to go get jobs. Every one of our students in that first program was quickly snapped up by employers because they already knew they were truly interested. If they sent them to get conduit, they weren’t coming back with a screwdriver. They had a little bit of knowledge.
As the skilled trades continue to face workforce shortages, expanding access to apprenticeship and finding new ways to support both employers and apprentices is critical.
Watch the full conversation with Natasha Sherwood and Jeanette Abrahamsen to hear more about federal funding, AI in apprenticeship, and IEC's pre-apprenticeship program.