National Apprenticeship Week is November 17 to 23
“Businesses don’t launch and run apprenticeships on their own. What America needs most is a thousand intermediaries working hard to make apprenticeship infrastructure where there was none before,” writes Achieve Managing Partner Ryan Craig in his book Apprenticeship Nation.
Apprenticeship intermediaries connect and serve the partner organizations that create earn-and-learn apprenticeship programs. The work of establishing lots of good ones has much to learn from the 33-year-old effort to create a new chartered sector of U.S. K-12 public schools.
National Apprenticeship Week is a suitable time to review what apprenticeship intermediaries do and suggest four lessons learned from the charter school movement that are relevant to expanding the number of intermediaries. I hope that this encourages a more thorough conversation between those from the world of chartering and the world of apprenticing that helps both groups become more effective at what they do.
