Giving Compass' Take:

• CareerWise Colorado is an apprenticeship program for high schoolers that allows them to gain knowledge in specific skills sets, provides them wages, and ensures students have a sufficient amount of work experience once they graduate. 

• School districts should partner with a variety of employers to create more options for students and their counselors should pay attention to what apprenticeships are consistently working for students and which are not. Evaluating the apprenticeship model can help its efficiency and success. 

• Read about how apprenticeships could solve employment problems. 

In Colorado, there’s a nascent effort to use apprenticeships to give high schoolers work experience, and to do so in high-wage, high-demand career fields. At the end of the apprenticeships, which last three years, students have on-the-job experience, a useful credential in hand and one year of college credit. They also earn about $30,000 in wages over the duration of the program.

School counselors and parents, especially, had to be convinced that this modern apprenticeship system wasn’t a second-tier alternative to college, as traditional vocational education has sometimes been.

The program, CareerWise Colorado, has placed 116 apprentices from four school districts with 40 employers this year, its first. Students split their time between a traditional classroom, the workplace, and a training center, where they receive technical instruction they’ll need on the job. The program starts the summer before a student’s junior year and ends one year after high school graduation.

Read the full article on modern apprenticeships by Tara García Mathewson at The Hechinger Report