Registered Apprenticeship (RA) opportunities don’t exist without employer involvement. RA programs are well established as a win-win solution for workers, employers, and local economies. However, rural communities, which have unique workforce needs, face challenges when it comes to engaging employers in RA: Smaller concentrations of employers, constraints on organizational capacity, and a lack of examples or established models to draw from can hinder the uptake of apprenticeship.
Yet more rural communities are looking to the national growth of apprenticeship as a potential strategy to solve their workforce needs, support local economic development, and increase retention of community members. To pair this heightened interest with employer involvement, rural practitioners can leverage a variety of approaches. These include:
- Partnering with a range of community stakeholders, including chambers of commerce, economic development entities, school systems, local workforce boards, and civic clubs, such as the Rotary or Lions Clubs, to expand employer networks
- Building organizational knowledge and understanding of apprenticeship to address questions, concerns, and potential misconceptions from employer partners
- Becoming an RA sponsor or assisting in the development of group sponsorship models so that employers, especially smaller employers, can participate
Jobs for the Future (JFF) partnered with the Rural Youth Catalyst Project (RYCP) to better understand how to effectively support the development of RA and other work-based learning programs in rural communities. Through this partnership, we identified specific considerations for designing programs and engaging rural employers. These considerations, along with a set of promising practices and tactics, are available in our new publication with RYCP: “Building Effective Employer Partnerships to Support Apprenticeship Placement for Rural Young Adults.”
This blog highlights three key challenges and offers examples of how programs in the field have addressed them.