Vinz Koller, Senior Strategist for Capacity Building at Social Policy Research Associates: The Future of Learning is Work

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Welcome to WorkforceRx with Futuro Health, where future-focused leaders in education, workforce development and healthcare explore new innovations and approaches. I’m your host Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health.

If you don’t know much about apprenticeship, prepare to be converted today as I welcome our self-described apprenticeship evangelist, Vinz Koller, to the podcast.

Vinz has deep experience working with local communities, states, and the US government to determine how to make work -based learning more accessible to more people. His passion for dual professional education is rooted in the system he was exposed to growing up in his native Switzerland.

In his current work as senior strategist for Capacity Building at Social Policy Research Associates, Vinz is coaching several states in expanding their apprenticeship systems — including California’s effort to introduce youth apprenticeships at scale — and is working at the national level to develop inclusive apprenticeship and career pathway systems.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Vinz.

Vinz Koller

Thanks, Van, for having me. Really great to be here.

Van

Absolutely. Well, today I opened up my email and got a newsletter from Ryan Craig, who co-founded Apprenticeships for America, and in it was an article that had this title: “Endangered Species, Good Entry Level Jobs” and it said that a possible scenario of the future is that AI can take over the tasks done in entry level jobs and therefore the volume of entry level roles that require no work experience will become an endangered species. What do you think about that future, Vinz? Is there anything we can do about that?

Vinz

Well, actually, in some ways, it argues for apprenticeship. My wife often tells me that the answer to every question that I give is ‘apprenticeship’ and she’s not wrong. But in this case, I do believe that if you have a scenario where the entry -level work — let’s say a sort of an entry -level associate, even in a law office — goes away because now AI can do a lot of those functions, then obviously, training that person to a higher level is important and there is no better way to train someone to a higher level than the untrained entry level, than doing it on the job. So, I would argue that in an AI world, the need for a type of work -based post -secondary education is going to be more important and the people who don’t have access to that are going to be left behind in more dire states than they are currently.

Van

The key phrase that you talked about is work -based and secondary education all in one. So let’s go into this model of apprenticeship, which is much more common and extremely well -known in Europe, but is less well -known here in the US. Give us a general understanding of the apprenticeship model, will you, Vinz?

Vinz

Sure. You know, I did grow up in Switzerland so I grew up in an educational environment where apprenticeship, and in particular what we think of or call youth apprenticeship in this country, is ever present. I didn’t realize it was unusual at the time because when you grew up in a system you think that’s the way the world is.

Then later, since my professional life has been in the US, I realized over time, well, that is not at all how some other countries approach it.  The US, in some ways in the Western industrialized world, is a little bit of an outlier and has less of the apprenticeship model than many other countries. The main difference that I see, and this is one of the reasons I often talk about the Swiss model — not because that’s necessarily the best, but because it is actually very adaptable to the US environment — but the main difference that young people experience in Switzerland is at age sixteen, they can decide if they want to go straight to university on an academic -only path, or if they want to gain work experience in what they call a dual path where they split their time between classroom and work about fifty-fifty. And after about two years, three years, four years — depending on the level of apprenticeship they’re aspiring to — they then graduate both from their post -secondary education — and they graduate from their apprenticeship and they are now a regular employee.

The hire into those occupations happens in high school and what’s interesting between the two systems is about the same number of people get to four -year degrees in the US as in Switzerland — about 25% — but the 75 % that don’t go there straight have a pathway that gets them post -secondary education and they often find after they’ve spent a few years in a workplace, you know, ‘now I want to do that master’s degree in chemistry after all because now I understand why it’s helpful in my profession.’ Whereas in an academic only path, especially for those who sort of tire out on that model, the understanding of why that could be interesting and worthwhile just isn’t there unless you’ve been exposed to the context within which that theoretical knowledge becomes meaningful.

Van

Vinz, can I ask you, I understand the academic path is one where, for example, you’re the student, you pay the tuition check, and so that’s pretty clear how that model would work. But in the dual model, who pays for tuition, for example? Is it out of the pocket of the student or is it the employer or some other entity?

Vinz

Yeah, I think that’s probably one of the big benefits to students is this whole equation around what does education cost, right? We understand up to high school, education should be free. Many states extend that now to some extent into the community colleges, but in apprentice experiences — for example, again, in the Swiss system — even in high school they start earning a wage. So, if they spend 50% of their time in a workplace they get a wage.  It’s not very high. It’s a training wage of about $1,500 a month and the second year it’s probably $2,000 a month. I can tell you, though, as someone who’s experienced this myself that while I did the academic path my buddies had $1,500 a month — it probably wasn’t quite that much when I went to school, but still it was way more than I had — so they were driving a motorcycle when I was on the moped or driving a moped when I was on the bicycle. They were always ahead financially, which is interesting because you think of the academic path to the lawyer and the doctor as maybe being the more lucrative. But in reality, it is the work -based learning, the dual path, that is the more lucrative.

Today in those countries that do this in a widespread way, there’s more equity between those paths and the academic path. You know, heads of banks and captains of industry took that path. And industry itself looks at people who have crossed over, who’ve done both, favorably. They would rather have an engineer who has practical experience than an engineer who just comes from MIT If they have a choice between the two. So, that’s how it actually pays off. The positive difference in a lifetime of earning on average is about $300,000 between someone who does the work -based learning path and someone who doesn’t.

The other thing that’s interesting when you look at the statistics in an economic downturn is that the people who get laid off first and those that get rehired first are the people with work -based learning experience. They have the fewest unemployment weeks in their lifetime, fewer than people who have academic -only skills, because it turns out you actually need people who know how to do things, not just know how to think. So, that’s a little bit of that differential between, do you have the work -based path or not?

Van

So, is the work environment a better place for learning than most schools? I mean, is there a better learning environment that is more inspiring for high schoolers and, frankly, even college students to actually complete their education?

Vinz

I wouldn’t say it’s the better environment. I think we’ve been expecting things of education that education — and I mean by that classroom education — just can’t deliver.  I honestly sometimes feel like we are hard on educators for reasons that are beyond their control and that they shouldn’t be held responsible for.

Employers say, you educators don’t prepare your students for the workplace. They’re not ready when they come to us. But we don’t ask the question about, well, what’s your role in this? Why don’t you help us? The reality is a classroom is not a good environment to prepare someone for everything that the working life requires. What we need to do is give people a chance to practice. It’s obvious when we think about it. We don’t say a pilot should get into his 747 and fly 300 people around from a manual, right? We expect them to have done it a lot in simulators and then in actual planes and then in planes with passengers where they’re the co -pilot. There is a whole pathway. That’s all in apprenticeship. Surgeons don’t get to operate on my brain without having done it a lot and having gone through what we call a residency, but it’s really an apprenticeship.

So, we do this in all the jobs that really, really matter. And yet we then expect in certain jobs that all you need is to just go to college, and then you magically will know what the workplace requires. So, I think it’s  about ‘fit for purpose.’ The classroom is very good at certain things. We have to know the context. We have to know history. That’s not something you’re gonna learn in a workplace. But it’s not very good at teaching you the latest CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine.

In fact, even there, I find educators sometimes get put into roles where we’re excited when the new lab gets inaugurated at a community college — which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe even millions — and the reality is the workplace has that machinery all the time. It gets upgraded. The companies have to keep upgrading it but meanwhile, the classroom is probably going to fall behind. Five years from now, those robots are going to be outdated and there’s not going to be the money to replace them.

The macroeconomic benefit of what employers put into that system  — and I see this in Switzerland all the time — is enormous. Seventy percent of the cost of the dual education system in Switzerland gets paid for by employers because they provide the workplace and they provide the wages and that’s 70% of the cost. The classroom is the classroom is the classroom. It’s there as well, but it actually costs a little less because the students are in the workplace half the time, which means teachers have more time for preparation. You can even pay them a little more because they’re actually serving basically half the number of students if you look at it that way, and you can actually really focus on the classroom portion in a new way. There are a number of benefits.

So, I wouldn’t say one is better than the other. I will point out, though, that recently there was a survey in Colorado where they asked employers, ‘which is the better place to learn which skills, the workplace or the classroom?’ Out of a big list of skills, employers said the only thing that the classroom is better at is math and communication. And they said math is not that important, frankly, and communication is very important. They also ranked it in importance. They said everything else — workplace skills, employability skills, or soft skills, team building, you name it — was all on the workplace side. They just didn’t think that it was the educator’s job to do this.

So, I think that the key there is to turn employers into not just consumers of talent, but producers or co -producers of talent. There’s a number of reasons why that’s better that we can get into, but the key benefit, I think, is that we let educators shine where they’re best able to shine and we don’t force stuff onto them that really they’re not equipped to do.

Van

So, this call to action of yours, which is turning employers into co -producers of talent — what a great phrase – that model rests on the participation of employers and in a way you could argue that in the last few decades, employers have been actually shying away from having a big role because the tenures of employees are getting shorter and due to many other pressures on them. So, what can be done for employers to really buy into this concept? This model only works with employers at the table, right?

Vinz

I think they have to be shown how it works and the benefits of it. What’s interesting, again, taking the vision of the talent development and talent curator a step further…imagine a world where employers go to high schools to find talent the way they go to high schools to find talented athletes. It’s a pathway to get at the talent. It’s kind of odd when you think about it that we do that for athletics, but for employment we don’t do it. My sense is that the talent is out there. There should be competition for that talent.

In Switzerland that competition exists. There are 60,000 unfilled apprenticeship slots every year in Switzerland. That means it’s an apprentice’s market and that means if you’re a good employer that wants good talent in your company, you go to those high schools and you recruit for the apprenticeship position of a sixteen and seventeen year old the same way you would if you thought this guy or this girl is superb at soccer or at ultimate frisbee. So, I think there is a way in which employers are both demonstrated that this works and they have to be shown.

This is because we don’t have it in our DNA in the US to do it, except in construction where everybody understands that’s the way to go. We have to basically demonstrate that. I can tell you that in places like, for example, South Carolina, a community college or technical college has this system with companies. The first time they had a sign-up day, ten or fifteen employers and maybe twenty students and parents came. Now, this is like standing room only. Companies show up, they want to recruit and when somebody’s hired, they get the t -shirt of that company. It becomes like March madness, but they’re actually recruiting high school students.

There’s a process in which after a while, you reach the tipping point and then it becomes the new normal. We have a ways to get there to create that environment, but employers will listen to other employers better than to anyone else and so that’s why we have to have some proof points — we have examples from the US as well — that we can point to and say, look, check out how they do it. Over time, I think we will reach that tipping point.

Van

I mentioned in my introduction that you’re working with a number of states to introduce and improve the adoption of apprenticeship as a model. What are the levers that states or public policy makers have in order to increase adoption?

Vinz

I think simplifying access is probably the biggest lever, and that requires often some changes to the bureaucracy that currently governs how education and workforce programs collaborate. This varies from state to state, so this typically has to be handled at the state level. Traditionally, apprenticeship — because it sits between education and workforce — doesn’t have a natural home. It’s very important that we think of it as an education program, not just as a workforce preparation program. Because it does post -secondary education in the workplace, it requires that we give credit for the skills that are learned. So, I would say rationalizing or finding a home for the reform effort, to the extent that reform is required, is important. Giving credit to work -based learning and giving equal credit to whether you’re doing the work -based path or the academic path is very important.

In the US, it’s very important that an associate degree accompanies the completion of an apprenticeship, ultimately, because otherwise you’re disadvantaging and you’re closing off the next degree to those who take the work -based learning path. And one of the things that’s very important for this model to work, is that you can cross over from one side — the academic path — to the dual path easily. That’s a lesson that the European models had to learn as well. They didn’t do that in the 70s, 80s, and even into the 90s and they lost a lot of potential apprentices because they said, well, you know, I’m not sure that I’m going to be successful if I don’t take the academic path.

The other policy levers have to do with incentives, in some cases, although I will say, we often think we have to fund apprenticeship. You mentioned Ryan Craig. He is, I think, a bit of a believer in that. I’m less of a believer in funding apprenticeships and certainly not wage subsidies — which I’m sure Ryan would agree don’t need to be subsidized — but I don’t think we should do too much on the incentives front except for making the system very, very easy for employers to engage with.

We have hundreds of community colleges in California, just as an example. We have a thousand school districts. Employers can’t be dealing with all of those. Even in LA basin, you’re dealing with so many institutions. They can’t be doing this. They need some intermediaries that can make it simple to become a hosting company, to recruit apprentices online, to download some standards for the training, to track whatever the government needs from them in order to be tracking the employees properly. All of that should be way, way easier than it currently is.

So, there’s a lot of work that states can do and some legislation is often required and we have examples for that. States have made that progress, have been the early adopters. There’s model legislation that’s available so that if another state wants to pick it up, they can look to it.

Van

I’d love for you to share with us an exemplar of an employer apprenticeship program and their structure here in the United States and also an exemplar from a state that has done a good job at cultivating apprenticeships. Do you have examples?

Vinz

The early adopter of all the states was Wisconsin. Again, I’m focusing on youth apprenticeship because the average apprentice in the US is thirty years old while in Europe the average age is about seventeen. The reason that, as an economy, we need to get the average age down and we really have to go into high schools for this is that at that time in a young person’s life the training wages make sense, but when you are thirty and you have a family and you have to buy a house or whatever then the apprenticeship wage, the lower wage, is very, very tough to do.

Also, the positive return on investment that employers can get if they work with an adult is not the same as investing in a high schooler. But also if you look at the other way, we have a big cliff after high school where there’s a way too large number of young people that are not finding the transition into the world of work. At some point they may get there, but these six or seven years of delay…they are really incredibly impactful on the communities that these young people come from, on those families, and they can never catch up. So, we have to give them a better connection earlier on.

So the examples that I would cite are Wisconsin, which was the early adopter in the 90s. Colorado is a more recent and maybe most advanced of the recent state adopters. Washington state has followed a similar model. And now Indiana, South Carolina, New York, Washington DC…all of those are mostly following the Swiss model or central European model and they take delegations to Switzerland usually. There’s an institute there where they can study it, they can compare notes.

There are interesting examples. I mean, I was at a presentation at JPMorgan Chase in their big tower. They’ve made a significant investment into apprenticeship and there was this young man with his mother talking about the experience of being an apprentice. He said the first time he walked into this building, I’m thinking, I don’t belong here. He’s African -American. I don’t belong here. This is, I think ,the biggest bank in the country. So he says, I’m walking in there. I have a job. I’m going to the 45th floor and I’m becoming an IT apprentice at JP Morgan Chase. His mother is listening to this and she says, you know, I believe in my son, but he didn’t believe that he could be here, that he belonged here and now he’s here. It turns out this young man, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, built a piece of software that is now standard software being used by JP Morgan Chase.

The examples that I see when these programs get implemented in the US are the exact same thing that we see in Europe. These young people are incredibly capable. They have to be trusted. You have to trust and verify, but trust that you are able to do these things. And where we often look at young people as sort of risk factors — my god, can we really let them be on the shop floor, are they gonna break things, are they gonna get injured — well, they are gonna behave in a way that is expected of them.

The abilities that these young people display when given those responsibilities are tremendous and what it does to their self -perception and to the perception in the community about who they are is transformational for sure.

Van

Well, I love that example of JP Morgan Chase because it’s a white collar job that you don’t normally associate with apprenticeship. So, thank you for that example. Vinz, getting back to AI, what do you think the impact of AI is on the apprenticeship model?

Vinz

Well, all predictions about AI are wrong, so I’ll make a wild prediction of my own. AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, it will change a lot of jobs, and it will create new fields and new skills will emerge. I do a presentation on apprenticeship that I entitled “The Future of Learning is Work” which is a little bit of a play on words because I was in a series of talks with someone who said the future of work is learning. Both are true, but I’m more right than they are because I actually think that in times of transition, figuring out what the future workplace holds is especially important. Along the lines of what I said earlier about what we expect of educators…we think that a community college or an institution of higher learning can predict what skills are needed in five or ten years and frankly, that’s not possible. And because it’s not possible, we have to allow educational institutions to teach what is kind of universal.

We will be talking to each other. We will be writing to each other. We will be needing to understand our own history of thought, of discourse and so forth. But, we will not know what software will be in place. We will not know what AI can do for us. I’m amazed every day by what AI can do that I didn’t know yesterday it could do, and 90 % of the things that it can do, I have no clue about. When the transition in the workplace is so rapid, then the model of apprenticeship is particularly appropriate because in my view, apprenticeship is a look into the future. You are actually in the workplace. You don’t have to predict what things will be like in ten years. The workplace will evolve and you will evolve with it.

I was visiting an apprenticeship program near where I live on the Monterey Peninsula. It’s in a marina where electric air taxis are being built and apprentices are being shown how to build it. They don’t even have descriptions for the skills that are needed because this kind of aircraft has never existed. There is no rule book to go to, there is no classroom training, you have to build it from scratch. But the company can’t wait until those courses are developed by some educational institution. They’re building it as they go. And that’s, again, an example where the future readiness of an apprenticeship system is ideal.

It’s ironic that one of the oldest methods of training that we assume humans ever deployed — which is you look at the person next to you and figure out how did they use the rock and then you learn that you could use the rock a little better yourself — is still so appropriate in the most modern work environment. But that’s why I do believe the impact AI has on apprenticeship models is that it makes them probably more useful and more prevalent. Going right back to the beginning of our conversation, if the gap that will emerge between where someone is when they finish a classroom -based education and all those activities that an AI system can do and what the human still is needed for, if that becomes too great, then we have inequality grow further and the gap between those who can make that jump and those who can’t will be that much greater.

I would say one more thing that I didn’t mention earlier about the impact of having apprenticeship widely available. It’s not just that the cost of education goes down, or put another way, it’s not just that there’s an income flow to the people who are in an apprenticeship program, but the cost of education goes to zero or becomes actually a revenue center. For example, the company JP Morgan Chase, as well as some other companies like the insurance company Aon, pay for education for their apprentices. They cover 100 % of the tuition if an apprentice of theirs wants to go to the next level. That’s true for a lot of apprenticeship providers.

I visited a manufacturer in Utah where if you want to become an engineer, they will pay half the tuition, in that case. They want you to become an engineer on their dime — or half their dime, I should say — and you have an income while you’re doing it. So, that is turning something that, in the US, is resulting in billions in student debt into the opposite — a positive income flow.

Van

Vinz, let’s wrap up this podcast with one final question. What’s your final word on the future of apprenticeship ten years from now?

Vinz

Yeah, that’s a good question. I often start my talks with a little visioning exercise where I ask those in the audience to close their eyes and I draw a little future for them, maybe somewhat idealized in my mind, about where we could be ten years from now. Usually what that future holds is that apprenticeship is widespread in every occupation — white collar, blue collar green collar and everything in between — and essentially, every job that requires a certain level of skill is accessible through an apprenticeship. My sense is in ten years we could make that available to virtually every high school student in, say, California.

Washington State has that stated goal. In fact, it’s sooner than in ten years, but they started probably earlier. So for them, it will be a ten year horizon. What that will do is if we took the state the size of California, it will put about $8 billion in disposable income into those young people’s pockets. It will do almost the exact opposite to the debt. So, their educational debt will be reduced by eight to nine billion. The investment that employers make into those careers of those young people is in the neighborhood of $13 billion, and that is doable. We did the math about how many apprentices a state the size of California could handle. The US currently has about 500,000 apprentices. California alone — if it was operating at the level that the economy needs and could handle — would have 650,000 apprentices. It currently has about 100,000. So that’s the macro future that I envision.

The micro future is exemplified by Joby Aviation, an aircraft manufacturer here in the Salinas Valley. They’re currently recruiting the children of farm workers in the Salinas Valley to build these planes. One reason they’re doing it here is proximity to Silicon Valley, which is meaningful, but the reason they’re recruiting here is that they cannot afford to import labor from elsewhere, because the labor cannot afford to live here but those kids of the farm workers already live here. However, they don’t have a sense of a future. They don’t want to be farm workers themselves, per se — although they might be willing to operate a robot that does the farm work for them — and that’s also in the future. So for them, it is a path toward a meaningful and well compensated job that allows them to live where they currently live and not have to move elsewhere.

So, I think there are a lot of benefits in that kind of a future. I think we can get there. In California, the governor’s goal of getting to 500,000 definitely requires that we do it starting with high schools and add a lot of high schools to this mix. And that’s the other exciting part in California. We are at a point where new plans are coming to fruition. The California Youth Apprenticeship Committee has just finished up its work and the final report is coming out soon. The Master Plan for Career Education that the governor is working on is in the works and that would also, I think, reinvent career education in California in a significant way.

So, I think we’re in a good time when it comes to the potential for apprenticeship to actually becoming a reality for a lot of people in the US in general, and in California specifically.

Van

Well, you certainly delivered in terms of us calling you an apprenticeship evangelist. We learned so much doing this time with you, Vinz. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Vinz

Thank you so much for having me.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future -focused workforce in America.