News you should know about money and things getting people to work

If I were Trump II, I would take a couple of big hints corporate employers dropped in a report developed by Apprenticeships for America and IBM, announced Wednesday at AFA’s conference here in Washington.

To be clear, that’s me talking, an important thing to note for the sake of organizations trying to shift policy with a White House that’s prioritizing Big Feelings and getting back at the folks who hurt those feelings. But as I cover a bit more below, the ideas in the report—put forward by folks at companies like Lockheed Martin, Accenture, Google, and others in addition to IBM—are very relevant to what’s happening, and not happening, here in Washington.

So what’s in this report? Well, it does play the hits—apprenticeship is too complicated to get started, apprenticeship’s messaging is too muddled, and there needs to be more, and simpler, public funding of the pay-to-train variety that AFA has vocally supported. But there also are a few things that I think political leaders handling workforce sorely need to hear, like how trying to grow without a plan isn’t exactly the most productive approach.

“The sheer push for numbers is not what a strategy is,” IBM’s Jenn Ji said during a panel at AFA’s summit on Wednesday describing the work of the Business-Led Apprenticeship Solutions Team, or BLAST.

That comment really landed with me, and not just because I’ve spent 13 months writing about a federal effort to reach one million apprentices not believed to be going well. Over the past two decades, the big honkin’ political directive around apprenticeship has basically been to grow by any means necessary. Yet, quality growth is what’s needed to sell, establish, and maintain the option to employers and workers.

Much of that growth imperative has been about adding a bunch of new programs, and I get that. You can’t add a bunch of new apprentices without creating a bunch of new places for them to go. But the BLAST report suggests that there may need to be more of a focus on existing programs, too.

That makes sense. If growth is the point, getting more organically out of existing programs is a way of working smarter, not harder. That effort should include, as the BLAST report notes, letting more workers know about those apprenticeships and how to get them, a common issue that ought not to be that common.

Similar to other AFA materials, the document also calls for more public funding of apprenticeship. I think there’s an Administration angle here I’ll cover in a second, but I’m not too far removed from hearing House Republicans suggest too much money gets spent in this area. I read this as large employers saying out loud that’s not the case.

Here’s a vibe that kept popping up in my conversations around AFA’s summit on Wednesday (and really the past few weeks): Trump II is very good at hyping people up on workforce issues, and they can say the right things on these issues when they’re not being unnecessarily confrontational with people they need to do their work. But the execution hasn’t been there—and I heard increasing questions this week as to whether you can call the current effort to reach one million apprentices a strategy beyond “Do whatever we can think of that involves apprenticeship.”

I hate to keep leaning on this fact, but these are large employers—some with leadership complimentary of the President—saying out loud what they need in ways that I immediately clocked as being fundamentally different than what I think the White House will allow. I get the political realities here, but if you’re going to try to really expand apprenticeship—which we kinda need as a retraining option for workers displaced by at least the idea of AI—then Conservative Enough may be not good enough to do the work.

Recent funding is a good example. The Administration definitely supports pay-to-train efforts typically backed by AFA. By June 30, it will have spent more than $180 million in the past year on setting up pay-to-train funds that incentivize new apprenticeship hiring. Yet, the funding opportunity setting up that money is really complicated in ways it didn’t need to be.

That’s in part because of a concern about “subsidizing programs with stable counts” of apprentices, the reason for why the Administration pushed a “substantial growth threshold” of 125 percent of existing programs’ enrollment over the past three years. In plain human English, that means if you averaged 10 apprentices per year, you need to hire three more before you get incentive funding, and you only get paid for the 13th.

To be fair, we don’t know how this will play out in fact because the funds aren’t set up and the cash isn’t even awarded; however, that confusing piece of the funding likely still is an active turnoff for some employers. I suspect the Administration outsmarted itself trying to do The Most Conservative Thing by installing a complicated component of funding meant to make sure that “wasteful” government spending doesn’t “prop up” existing programs that aren’t doing enough to grow and help the Administration hit Big Number.

Thing is, to hit Big Number, the Administration might need to spend toward maintaining apprenticeship enrollment in fields due to factors like, um, rising costs. I also have heard of programs struggling to get employers to take on new apprentices because the employers aren’t sure if AI will make those hires obsolete in the very near future. The incentives, which I hear many employers don’t think are large enough to start new programs, might get old ones to keep hiring apprentices. Which helps reach Big Number by not losing ground.

I can’t see the White House bending on things like this, though. It’s not The Most Conservative Thing, which is not “subsidizing” these programs, even if it’s in the Administration’s best interests.

Of course, politically, you get more credit for doing the thing that works, not necessarily the thing that’s most ideologically pure. This AFA report is a nice big hint, in neon with a Hintologist verifying its high hint content.

Trump II might want to take it.