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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nick Beadle: The thing I would like to start out with is OpenClassrooms’ journey as a company, which I think is really fascinating. How did you get to this particular point and what do you think of the American workforce market?

Pierre Dubuc: My journey started a long time ago, more than 20 years ago, in France. I started [the company] with my co-founder to create an online platform [with] the courses we wish we had in school. I started very young because that was in middle school and we created this online platform with free courses. Those courses were about coding.

After graduation [from college], we decided to make it our full-time job and build an online college out of it. We went from online courses to online college and degrees leading to jobs. This is what OpenClassrooms is about today.

We're all about a very specific type of social impact which is the number of students we place in the workforce—that’s 43,000 people last year. Essentially, we started in Europe building an online college, the first fully online college in France. From there we went into apprenticeship and workforce development—upskilling, reskilling. Then about five years ago, I moved to New York where we started developing a similar model, but in the U.S. context.

Today, we’re an accredited university. We can grant U.S. degrees—associate, bachelor’s, masters—[and] we are a Registered Apprenticeship provider. We are now combining the two together in the form of apprenticeship degrees.

It’s extremely aligned to employers’ demand. It leads to a degree. From day one, as an apprentice, you have a job. So, you’re hired from day one. Your salary and tuition fees are covered by the company meaning it’s completely debt-free.

Nick Beadle: There tends to be a gravitation to the big employers in terms of building out policies, but a lot of employers are smaller. How can those guys get a little bit more attention in policy and some of the love in how public training programs are designed?

Pierre: The question is, if we observe that most jobs are created with small businesses, how can we empower them to create even more? In concrete terms on apprenticeship and workforce development, I do think we should give more financial incentives to small businesses than we do to large businesses. Right now, we don't differentiate.

A small business definitely needs more support to run apprenticeship programs than a large Fortune 500 company. I would definitely recommend like trying to redirect our workforce development and apprenticeship funding mostly towards small and medium-size businesses. I think that would have a great impact.

But I think it's also a question of marketing and communication. We need to get the word out. Apprenticeship is not really well understood. Most companies don't know about it or they don't really know what the difference is between an apprenticeship and an internship and co-op and all of those things.

Nick: I think that’s one of the missing pieces here, too. Not only know people knowing it’s an option, but letting people know how to get into an apprenticeship is tricky, too.

Pierre: It starts with employers because apprenticeship is an employer-led program. At the end of the day, we need employers to hire, and what we do in a nutshell is we start with employers’ need.

About half of the market is visible. You go on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Linkedin, etc. You see those jobs and there are literally dozens of millions. So what we do is we start with those employers’ needs in the form of job postings.

If they have a need right now in cyber security in San Diego, we know about it and within 24 hours, we'll get in front of them to tell them all of the benefits they could have through hiring an apprentice on cybersecurity. That’s essentially how we think we can connect the dots and align [in] real time.

Nick: This may be a funny question to ask, but what do you guys see in apprenticeship in the United States, from a business perspective? Obviously, there have been high-profile dropouts of companies in this area in recent years. I know folks who have said, “There’s no way to really make money here because it’s so dependent on public money.” What are you guys seeing in this field that says, “Hey, this is worth betting on?”

Pierre: Apprenticeship means two different things in this country. It means hiring new folks. It's a recruitment program, but it can also be leveraged to upskill and reskill incumbent workers. And that's actually really different, right?

Some countries only do the former and some countries do both. I think it's a great thing that [Registered Apprenticeship] can be leveraged for both like recruitment and reskilling incumbent workers because it's much easier for incumbent workers. As an employer, you already have the person. You don't have to take like a bet on somebody new. If you can get funding, it feels like a pretty easy move to reskill somebody you already know and put them in a new job.

When you talk to policymakers, [they] think apprenticeship and [they] tend to picture a young person being hired by a company. The truth is half of our apprentices are not young persons. They’re in their mid-career, they’re in their thirties and forties, and they’re switching careers and they’re already employed.

When it comes to business, funding, public funding is not exceptional, but it is growing. We've seen this RFP for example from [the Department of Labor] on pay-per-performance.

The good thing is we're moving from a kind of a grant-based approach and that is expense-based—as a provider you spend, you get money, which is kind of a weird way to think about it. [We’re moving] to something that is more performance-based—you place appliances, you're getting paid.
 
It means that it drives businesses to make improvements in terms of efficiencies because they can make margins. That is good. That creates a market. We see also more and more states investing massively into apprenticeship. Think of Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana, California, etc. And that is great because we need concentration of funding. We need concentration in regions, and we need concentrations in job families and industries. And this is definitely what we've been noticing lately is it was very spread out before and now it's getting more and more concentrated.

We need it to be more systemic to have like a proper market that is structured enough so [that] many new players can come and operate it at a good scale. Because you're right. Until now, most apprenticeship programs are actually operated by nonprofits [and] community-based organizations. It’s pretty small and kind of mom-and-pop institutions. So we need to change that if we want to reach one million apprentices.

Nick: It requires more money, I gather, too. Something that I had conversations about this week was employer recruitment. From your perspective, what is the way to sell employers on apprenticeship? Because I frequently hear from them, “Hey man, this is too expensive” or “You’re selling me something that it’s going to take me years to get return on investment” Or “I feel like I’ll be saving money I don’t know that I’m even spending.”

Is there something that we’re not necessarily selling businesses on about apprenticeship in the United States?

Pierre: I think we should start from employers needs. It needs to be addressing a pain that they feel right now. If you want to hire in healthcare right now, you have a problem. If you play on [relieving] that pain, you're more likely to interest employers.

If you talk to a small business, honestly, it is going to have to be financed. It's going to be really hard for them to try out something new. They don't really know. They're not really sure. You can say, ‘Hey it's gonna work and we have so many case studies and there's ROI.’ [But] they've never done it. So it needs to be financially attractive. In certain states where we have high density of funding, we can say training costs are fully covered. Twenty-five percent of the first year wages can be offset.

Now we're talking. So, if you're saying that if I hire an apprenticeship, I get $5k, $10k, $15k—help me train them and pay some of their managers’ time, then that’s interesting. And [if] you’re saying you already have existing talent, then I can meet next week.

You need to convince [employers] to get started and have a first apprentice. This apprentice needs to create value, grow their revenue, reduce their expenses and grow their profits, bring innovation—something very concrete for the business. If you can demonstrate that, then it's very likely next year they're going to hire new apprentices. And we've seen that over and over with our own employers. They start with one [apprentice] and it went really well. And they do another one the next year. And two. And three.

At first, to build the system, we need to invest more public funding, and then after a few years, once employers have tried that out, I do think that you can reduce that level of support and say, “OK, the cost was $10,000 and now we're paying only [$6,000] and you're going to have to put the bill for for the rest. I think once employers see the value, it will be possible to have a more balanced public private funding.

Nick: Is there a dollar amount for apprenticeship incentives that’s a get-you-in-the-door amount with some employers? Where we can get them interested in hiring that first apprentice and get hooked on apprenticeship?

Pierre: We see a lot of different numbers when we talk about apprenticeship. Some people say, “Yeah, it costs like $2,000, $3,000.” I don’t really think we’re talking about the same thing. In most countries, an apprenticeship program includes matchmaking—the intermediary, the sponsorship, the training, it costs around $10,000, $15,000, something along those lines. So it is expensive, right?

So I think to convince employers, a few grand is actually a little bit short. Especially small businesses. I think once you start being in the range of $5k to $10k, they’re like, “Oh, that’s actually quite significant.” That’s why [the] pay-per-performance [manufacturing fund] by U.S. DOL, it’s amazing, but it’s $3,500 per apprentice. I don’t think that’s enough to really finance the entire thing and convince small businesses.

It needs to be combined essentially. You need high density of funding at the state level, the federal level, with employers and other sources. So you can reach the point when small businesses are actually interested and they try it out for the first time. [Then] they're convinced and then next year they can actually invest themselves.