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Intro
Apprenticeships for America advances policies that expand Registered Apprenticeships across industries while ensuring access for workers from all backgrounds. Our advocacy focuses on strengthening employer incentives, modernizing apprenticeship systems, and expanding opportunities for populations that benefit most from earn-while-you-learn training.
Adopt Pay-for-Performance Incentives That Reward Real Apprenticeship Outcomes
To accelerate apprenticeship growth among small businesses, policymakers should adopt Pay-for-Performance incentives that reward verified outcomes — such as apprentice hiring, retention, and successful completion — rather than simply funding activity.
For employers, the greatest barriers to apprenticeship are not interest or need — they are upfront costs, administrative complexity, and financial risk. Outcome-based funding can directly support group sponsors and apprenticeship intermediaries that recruit employers, design programs, manage compliance, and deliver classroom instruction on their behalf. Instead of asking each small employer to build a program alone, policymakers can incentivize shared, scalable models, like those employer consortia in North Carolina, that lower costs and reduce red tape.
Policymakers can ensure public dollars flow only when employers hire, train, and retain apprentices.
This model protects taxpayers by paying for results, avoids subsidizing activity that would have occurred anyway, and creates a workforce strategy that employers can actually access and scale.
AFA in the News
A Big Bet on Apprenticeships in a Frozen Labor Market
Federal Funding
Federal investment plays a critical role in expanding apprenticeships across the United States – increasing Registered Apprenticeships by 80% over the last decade. Modest federal investments drove that progress—and proved apprenticeships work. This isn’t bloated spending; it’s smart, targeted investment that yields measurable returns for workers and businesses. A Washington State cost-benefit analysis found that, by far, Registered Apprenticeships offer the best value in public workforce programs. The average Washingtonian’s wage gain exceeds $30,000, with strong returns for both taxpayers and apprentices.
Meanwhile, Federal policy and funding continue to emphasize a college-for-all approach. For every Federal dollar spent on apprenticeship, roughly $1,000 is spent on higher education. Meanwhile, 45 percent of college graduates are underemployed, and student loan debt has reached a whopping $1.7 trillion— nearly $38,000 per borrower on average.
Apprenticeships offer a proven alternative: strong wages, career mobility, and no student debt. Policymakers should consider investment that would scale apprenticeships nationally and across industries.
Modernization
America’s apprenticeship system must evolve to meet the needs of a modern economy. The National Apprenticeship Act has not been meaningfully modernized in more than 80 years, and fragmented state processes too often slow employer participation. Excessive and inconsistent registration paperwork — that can exceed 35 pages — delays hiring without improving quality. In some states, apprenticeship councils function as additional bureaucratic layers, creating months-long bottlenecks for employers ready to train workers.
Congress can help modernize the National Apprenticeship System by establishing clear national approval timelines, standardizing registration paperwork, returning apprenticeship councils to an advisory role, and creating turnkey occupational standards that allow for faster review. These reforms would dramatically reduce friction while preserving program integrity — ensuring the system works for small employers instead of slowing them down.
It can also build new structures and frameworks that expand apprenticeships into emerging sectors including semiconductors, tech, including cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, and clean energy.
Boys and Men
Many young men today face declining labor force participation and fewer clear pathways into stable careers. Apprenticeships provide a proven solution by offering paid training, industry credentials, and long-term career mobility without requiring large amounts of student debt.
Expanding apprenticeships can reconnect young men with the workforce while strengthening America's middle class.
AFA in the News
Don’t Just Talk About Young Men. Invest in Them
Why Apprenticeships Matter More Than Ever
Watch
Sutherland Institute Boys & Men Summit
Women & Girls
Apprenticeships create powerful career pathways for women into high-growth, high-wage industries. AFA supports policies that expand access, strengthen recruitment, and improve retention in apprenticeship programs. Expanding apprenticeships is not a zero-sum effort. Over the past decade, as federal investment has grown, the number of women in apprenticeships has more than tripled—opening new opportunities in fields where women have historically been underrepresented, including technology, construction, and advanced manufacturing.
Veterans
For veterans, apprenticeships are not just a training model, they’re a bridge between military service and careers that build on their strengths, like leadership, dependability and mission-orientation. Apprenticeships mirror the structure of military service: a mentor, a mission, and an identity built through discipline and skill.
That’s especially true of union programs like Helmets to Hardhats, which connect veterans to union construction jobs.
Employer-led efforts at UPS and Wells Fargo demonstrate the possibility of apprenticeship in emerging fields – whether that’s driving a truck for a high road employer or becoming a bank manager. Veterans at these companies combine on-the-job learning, and classroom instruction and with their GI Bill educational benefits, they can build stable careers and families that can get solid economic footing.
AFA supports policies that expand GI Bill access and strengthen veteran pathways into apprenticeship careers.
For veterans who choose tools over textbooks, the GI Bill gets stingy. Apprentices receive a shrinking housing allowance and little else, while college students collect full tuition and their housing stipends. In DC, that choice can cost a veteran apprentice nearly $150,000 in lost benefits, based on our calculations. It signals a lower perceived value for apprenticeship and an undercurrent of policy bias against those who choose to learn by doing rather than by the classroom. It’s time to reform the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Veterans deserve a GI Bill that recognizes that—and a system that invests in their skills, not just their degrees.
More on how the Post 9/11 GI Bill Underserves Veteran Apprentices
