Work in progress

THE SMELL OF FULL GRAIN leather permeates Economy Boots in Gautier, Miss. Store owners keep the shelves well stocked. That’s because outside the store, for miles in either direction, the Gulf Coast is work boot country. It’s hard hat and blue collar, a world of manufacturing plants, refineries, and shipyards.

Russell Sand Jr., a 38-year-old car-wash operator, wants to be part of that world. He’s standing in front of a rack of Red Wings at Economy Boots, studying steel toe footwear. Frustrated by a work schedule that leaves little time for his family, Sand is preparing for a new start at nearby Ingalls Shipbuilding, the largest supplier of the U.S. Navy’s surface combatants. The company’s facilities span 800 acres across both banks of the Pascagoula River. Sand’s electrician father-in-law works there, and he urged him for years to fill out an application.

But Sand isn’t starting out like his father-in-law, who already had the skills he needed as an electrician. Sand is on a different track, one that strategically meshes on-the-job experience with classroom training and instruction. For a full four years.

Like most manufacturing companies in the United States, Ingalls grapples with skilled labor shortages. After decades of emphasizing college as the gateway to a good career, fewer Americans are willing to get their hands dirty doing blue-collar work. Ingalls’ solution is apprenticeship, an earn-and-learn approach popular in other countries, and not just in the construction industry. Other American employers are starting to catch on. So is the government. And its growing interest comes with expanding—and some say, stifling—bureaucratic oversight.

Sand isn’t thinking about such details as he weighs his options at Economy Boots. He’s just thankful to be part of the next class of Ingalls apprentices, and he knows safety-specific boots are required. He makes his choice—a light, non-metal composite toe pair—and lays down the cash.

APPRENTICESHIP HAS BEEN A GATEWAY to the middle class since medieval times, when master craftsmen taught young people trades in exchange for service. Often the contracts included room and board, too. Notable early American apprentices include surveyor George Washington, printer Benjamin Franklin, and silversmith Paul Revere.

From the Colonial era to the early 1900s, apprenticeships were largely unstructured and unregulated. That changed with the advent of World War I and its demand for skilled manufacturing labor. The 1917 Smith-Hughes Act was the first to provide federal aid for vocational education. Twenty years later, Congress passed the National Apprenticeship Act, also known as the Fitzgerald Act. It fortified the role of the Department of Labor (DOL) in establishing apprenticeship standards and opportunities.

Today, more than a thousand occupations, from tuning musical instruments to operating wastewater treatment plants, make up the list of DOL-vetted registered apprenticeships. It’s a win-win: Employers get tax breaks and a pipeline of workers, while graduates earn an average of $80,000 per year.

Ingalls Shipbuilding offers registered apprenticeships in 15 different trades, and it’s not new at it, either. Ingalls has been in the apprenticeship business for nearly three-quarters of a century. That span of time of course includes 2005’s notorious Hurricane Katrina, a storm that changed the landscape of the Gulf Coast in many ways, and not all of them bad: Ingalls’ apprentice school—a 700,000-square-foot facility featuring 24 classrooms, three computer labs, a library, 26 offices, and a bookstore—was built, in part, with Katrina comeback funds.

Among the school’s state-of-the-art craft labs is one designed for pipe fitters. On a routine Wednesday morning, 20 trainees fill the space as high-pitched machines whir and grind all around them. One student bends over a clamped pipe, his welding flame glowing like a Fourth of July sparkler.

Covered in regulation long sleeves and face shields, the trainees are using machinery that helps them achieve a tolerance of 65-thousandths of an inch in diametrical clearance, a measurement the U.S. Navy specifies for a certain “fit up.”

According to Donny Dorsey, minute details like that matter when a ship’s liquids—cooling water, storm drainage, sewage—react to different pressures and temperatures on their way through miles of pipes. Dorsey, vice president of operations at Ingalls, is seated two stories above the lab in the school’s library. Dressed casually with his shirt collar splayed open against a white T-shirt, he’s looking out through a wall of windows at the shipyard below. Nearly 8,000 workers are down there plying their trades.

“There was a time when this country put a lot of focus on mechanical skills,” Dorsey says matter-of-factly, using his hands for emphasis. “We quit doing that and told everybody that they needed to do something different to be successful. Now we find ourselves where we find ourselves.”

That would be in a national hiring crisis. For Dorsey, a man focused on crucial warship-building schedules, investing in apprenticeship makes sense. “We’re developing experienced craftspeople who will make the difference three and four years from now.”

Unlike their college-bound counterparts, those craftspeople won’t pile up tuition debt while they’re learning. Instead, they’ll get paychecks, insurance benefits, and vacation time. And because an apprenticeship is a job, it’s the only kind of “higher education” where students from different backgrounds compete on equal footing. It’s a leveler. No one comes in with financial advantage or disadvantage.

Dorsey puts the apprenticeship scene in the kind of pocketbook perspective that’s hard to ignore. “The quickest way to a six-figure ­salary is to come work for me. Advance through the steps, and pretty soon you’re there.”

How soon is pretty soon?

Dorsey doesn’t bat an eye: “Three years, if you work it right.”

Education and workforce expert Ryan Craig believes apprenticeship is underleveraged in America. His 2023 book, Apprentice Nation, makes a case for sweeping changes. He says the data is clear: Young people aren’t getting the economic return they expected from their college diplomas. Neither are their employers. “The skills that employers are seeking are skills that are hard to learn in a classroom, like using Salesforce or Workday software, things universities don’t train them to do.”

Beyond the digital skills gap, Craig says there’s an experience gap. “And AI makes it worse, because it’s doing the grunt work young grads used to do on their first job out of college. Employers expect higher-value work from the get-go.”

To put it another way, today’s employers are seeking applicants with a healthy dose of “skin in the game.”

According to a study conducted by Intelligent, an online magazine focused on education, nearly half of 800 companies they queried are planning to drop college degree hiring requirements for some positions. Many have already done so. The top roles where diplomas no longer seem to make all the difference are information services, software, finance, and insurance.

In 1940, 3.4 million Americans were four-year college graduates. Today, it’s more than 104 million. Consequently, the misguided “college for all” ethic has devalued a bachelor’s degree simply because an inordinate number of people possess them.

In contrast, Craig estimates the United States currently has just a half-million apprentices, with two-thirds of them in building trades like Ingalls offers. But across the globe, it’s also common to launch careers in technology, healthcare, and financial services through apprenticeship.

“Those countries have invested in an earn-and-learn infrastructure, whereas we’ve doubled and tripled down on tuition-­based debt infrastructure,” emphasizes Craig, who holds two degrees from Yale. “The idea that you go right from high school to a college that’s going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars a year with no certainty as to the outcome, I think, is an archaic notion.”

When it comes to apprenticeships, the United States lags behind other developed countries. Craig provides a comparison: “Based on the size of its economy, the U.K. spends the equivalent of $40 billion a year on apprenticeship. We spend less than 1/100th of that.” He says apprenticeship flourishes in other countries because it’s incentivized. “The government makes it easy for employers to say yes.”

A NEW WAVE OF APPRENTICESHIP interest is swelling, and the U.S. government wants to dive into it, though, it seems, in a bureaucracy-first fashion that’s more likely to hurt than help. Early this year, the Department of Labor announced the availability of an additional $200 million to strengthen registered apprenticeship. This came after another big move—December’s release of a stack of proposed apprenticeship rules. This once-in-a-generation rulemaking prompted the executive director of Apprenticeships for America, John Colborn, to address a California Zoom gathering called “ApprenticeSIP” in February. A YouTube video shows Colborn joining the call from his home in Virginia and referencing the 779 pages of new rules: “We found a lot of things in there we feel are going to turn off employers,” he tells the 12 poker-faced participants filling his screen. They don’t seem surprised.

Instead of reducing barriers to establishing apprenticeship programs, the new rules add them. For example, prospective employers must now prove they can financially sustain an apprenticeship, something Colborn sees as problematic: “No company wants to put their books in front of the Department of Labor to have them assessed. We’ve been doing apprenticeships in this country forever, and we’ve never asked for that before, and it’s worked.” That was just one of the problems Colborn found with the rules.

The DOL welcomed feedback during the proposals’ amending stage. That period has closed, and the department is in the process of reviewing and responding to each comment, as required by law. Among the comments is a 10-page letter from Colborn’s organization, as well as 100 pages of suggested edits. But even if the edits are duly considered, workforce expert Ryan Craig believes the rules don’t tackle America’s greatest apprenticeship problem—bureaucratic mismanagement.

“Instead of funding training efforts, we fund good grant writers. A $10 million grant will go to a community college. They’ll develop the curriculum for the classroom component of the apprenticeship program, register the program, do the paperwork, and then sit on their hands and wait for an employer to come to them asking to use their curriculum, which is not how apprenticeships work.”

Craig calls such efforts “paper apprenticeship programs.” He says the United States needs to shift from grant-based to formula-based funding the way other countries have. The government funds an apprentice’s training and offers an additional payment to the employer. Craig thinks that’s necessary because apprenticeships are expensive for employers to set up and run.

But is it the government’s role to fund private business? John Colburn admits it can be complicated. He discourages funding for apprenticeship wages. “We just think that introduces all sorts of distortions. People end up hiring apprentices, then they let them go as soon as the government subsidy goes away.”

But Colburn says having a skilled workforce is a necessary public good, and underwriting apprenticeship makes sense in light of the government’s abundant support of higher ed—all the state schools and community colleges, Pell grants, and guaranteed student loans. “But if you lined up an apprentice and a college student and looked at the level of public support each is getting, the college student gets about $50 for every dollar that an apprentice gets.”

Even if the government increases its support of apprenticeship, our labor woes will be hard to fix. Workforce participation remains below pre-pandemic levels. Nearly 2 million U.S. workers are missing from our pool of potentials, compared with February four years ago. The Ingalls Shipbuilding apprenticeship program, top-notch and full-steam, only averages a 45 percent completion rate among participants.

Crane operator Michael Cotten has been at Ingalls for 34 years, and he sees how worker shortages affect the shipyard. But he’s equally concerned about worker ethics. He describes what it’s like to believe in the dignity of work in the age of apathy. “I remind my fellow workers that we’re building soldiers’ homes, where they will lay their heads, eat their food, and also fight for our country. We’re not just moving steel. We’re protecting our country by building something that protects our soldiers.”

Even more than that, Cotten, a bi-vocational pastor, reminds himself that he’s working for God. “I’m not supposed to have to worry about people watching over me to do my job. What brings glory to my Savior also brings glory to my boss, because he has a worker that will do the job, and that teaches other people to do the same thing.”

Almost like an apprenticeship.

Russell Sand Jr. works in a different part of the shipyard. Four years have passed since he went boot shopping for his apprenticeship at Ingalls. He’s now 42, and his beard is more gray than not. At Ingalls, that isn’t a problem. The company recruits applicants in life’s midstride as much as it recruits seniors in high school.

In March, Sand and his family celebrated his graduation at Murky Waters, a barbecue joint near the beach. It was warm and breezy. Sand ate all the brisket he wanted and then some, all while a certificate showing his completion of a U.S. registered apprenticeship lay on the front seat of his car.

These days, Sand laughs about the big mistake he made on his first day. Those boots he picked out so carefully? They were the wrong kind. Riggers need steel toe, not composite toe, boots. That’s the kind electricians wear. It’s funny now, but of course it wasn’t funny then.

Although his rigging class started with 12 apprentices, only five finished. Rigging is challenging, physical work. Sand insists a crane does 90 percent of it, but there’s all that cable pulling. The hoisting, the shackling. And it starts early. He gets to the shipyard at 4:30 a.m., hoping for a good parking space. Any later and he’d have to join thousands of workers in a 2-mile walk.

But he might not have to pull cables for the rest of his working life. Sand’s final classes in the apprenticeship program covered production planning and principles of management. “They really want you to move up in this company,” he explains, detailing a possible trajectory: first foreman, then general foreman, superintendent, director. Advancement is likely for Sand, who graduated as Ingalls’ 2024 overall apprentice of the year.

He knows he owes a lot to his father-in-law, the longtime Ingalls electrician who pushed him to apply. He died while Sand was still in school. Talking about it now, Sand just nods his head and says out loud what everyone else is surely thinking: “He would have been really proud.”

Purpose-driven work

Nine years ago, a report from the American Institute for Economic Research called career change among older workers a new phenomenon. Today, it’s fairly common, with 39 marking the average age for a big switch. Interestingly, a work anniversary, birthday, or midlife milestone often precedes a job hunt.

At Ingalls Shipbuilding, 80 percent of apprentices are currently between the ages of 20 and 40, and in the apprenticeship world, those 20 and older are considered “mature.” That doesn’t keep Susan Jacobs, vice president of human resources and administration, from seeking even more “mature” applicants. Ingalls has had an apprentice as old as 71. Jacobs appreciates the work ethic, professionalism, and real-world knowledge midcareer folks can contribute.

She also knows they want something different from a job than most 18-year-olds, and it’s not just security and benefits. It’s purpose. “Maybe they’re 15 years into a career, and they just don’t feel that it has meaning. This place has a lot of meaning,” Jacobs explains. At Ingalls, she says, they build freedom.

“So when they come here and they see a ship start from a piece of steel and a few years later we’re turning it over to the customer, they know what they do makes a difference,” Jacobs said. “That ship could be around for 50 years. Maybe their grandchildren will be on it one day. It’s going to go out there and do good in the world.”

But not all employers are eager to fill apprentice slots with mature workers. Maybe that’s because our notion of apprenticeship seems to include an innate bias for youth. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, fewer than 10,000 Americans age 55 or older are currently involved in a registered apprenticeship. This, even though projections indicate 25 percent of the labor force—more than 42 million workers—will be 55 years or older by 2031.

Apprenticeships can throw midlife curveballs, too. Technology changes require significant retraining. Taking instructions from someone younger can be tough, and certain trades are physically demanding. For many, it’s been a while since studying was part of their schedule. And a lower initial income—wow. Talk about a big adjustment.

Yet it’s attitude, not age, that program leaders say makes for the most successful apprenticeships. And in industries like shipbuilding, the opportunity for higher wages is easy to see, even in bifocals. —K.H.

No degree, no problem

Below are some hands-on jobs that pay well—and don’t require spending four years in college:

(“Job Outlook” is the average growth over the next decade)