Aligning the Registered Apprenticeship and Workforce Development Systems: A Resource

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Apprenticeship is a training model that effectively meets business’ need for skilled workers while offering apprentices a job from day one. Significant federal, state, and private sector investment has jump-started expansion of the apprenticeship model into new industries and opened up access to diverse job seekers.

Increasing alignment between the apprenticeship and workforce development systems benefits both systems, as well as their business and job seeker customers. States see the greatest impact from their alignment efforts when they work across multiple dimensions of these systems.

As the country begins to move beyond the initial stages of expansion and seeks to make apprenticeship a common pathway into careers across the economy, states are seeking efficient ways of expanding the capacity of their apprenticeship system to reach businesses and potential apprentices and support success in every community. The workforce development system, with its national network of workforce boards, job centers, and wide range of partners, offers such access and is critical for expanding the scale of apprenticeship programs in the U.S.

This brief, developed by AIR for a project with the U.S. Department of Labor, identifies five dimensions for closer alignment across the apprenticeship and workforce systems, shares state promising practices, and provides an checklist to help states assess and strengthen alignment between these two important talent development systems.