Fresh off a bachelor’s degree in operations management from Auburn University, Michael Nielson stepped onto the floor of a Dal-Tile manufacturing plant to begin his career as a process engineer.
Some relocations and 30 years later, Nielson is now the plant manager for the company’s Dickson, Tennessee location. While he came into the manufacturing plant in the traditional way, he has found that path has largely dried up.
“We just don’t get a lot of people when we post supervisory roles,” Nielson says of the Texas-based company. “We don’t get a lot of traffic with outside people. And when we do, they want to work Monday through Friday, 8-to-3, and I tell them, ‘Well so would I.’”
The Big Idea: The company decided to team up with the University of Tennessee system to build a new route into those jobs: an apprenticeship degree program in advanced manufacturing. It joins a growing cadre of apprenticeship programs in manufacturing—with leaders in the industry believing that investments made over the past five or so years are finally hitting critical mass. The need for new pathways for recruitment and training are acute as the industry grows and evolves, with 462K jobs open today and ever more-advanced technology coming online.
The movement faces crosscurrents, chief among them the moving target of the Trump tariffs and the impact they will have on manufacturing jobs. There’s also uncertainty around federal investments in apprenticeships, which are generally bipartisan, and in specific emerging industries like electric vehicles and semiconductors.
The push for manufacturing apprenticeships is buoyed, though, by a “stuck” economy that has made it hard for new entrants—especially new college graduates—to land jobs on the open market. That economic reality is hitting after years of already growing disillusionment with college debt and the promise of the traditional degree.
“These days we’re seeing a shift away from the 40-plus years of everyone going to university—’If we’re not going to a four-year university, what does that look like?,’” says Tony Davis, national director of the Manufacturing Institute’s Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education. “And a good option is an ‘earn while you learn’ position. This is not new; it’s a respected model for manufacturing. We’re just seeing a different perspective than we have in a long time.”
Industry leaders are optimistic that philosophical reorientation, coupled with the appeal of an increasingly tech-driven industry, could create the perfect conditions for manufacturing apprenticeships to soar to new heights—if they can receive the financial and logistical support they need.
“Apprenticeship is a well kept secret but honestly it shouldn’t be; when students and employers learn about it and how successful it is, they want to get involved,” says Liz Weiss, deputy director at the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute, a nonprofit focused on workforce development. “It used to be in the building trades but now it’s in many fields from healthcare, to IT, to manufacturing. We’ve seen a lot of growth.”
Starting with Tile Manufacturing, Tennessee Dreams Big
The latest is the effort by the University of Tennessee System, which in early April approved the launch of an apprenticeship degree program in advanced manufacturing, teaming up with a local branch of Dal-Tile.
The UT system has one of the largest teaching apprenticeship programs in the country—clocking in at 885 current and graduated participants in its two years of existence—but the need for manufacturing and healthcare talent across the state has the university expanding its reach. Dal-Tile and the UT system became connected in part through the state’s efforts to expand the tile manufacturing talent pipeline, partnering with multiple industry giants including the Tile Council of North America and National Tile Contractors Association.
“I attribute it to that initiative, I really do,” Brandy Earheart, senior HR manager for the Dal-Tile Dickson, Tenn., facility, says. “Especially given our location, we’re in a bit of a higher education vacuum.”
UT’s manufacturing apprenticeship program will be funded by an $85K state grant and begin this August with five participants working at Dal-Tile while earning an interdisciplinary studies degree. Crisp says the university initially had an engineering degree in the program, but switched to interdisciplinary after surveying current employees about the skills they need to do their jobs and advance.
“They don’t really need engineering degrees; what they need is skilled technicians who are very specially skilled in what they do,” says Erin Crisp, assistant vice president for learner success and workforce pathways in the UT System. “But a degree is a nice benefit of employment and will likely keep them in the role longer.”
Crisp believes UT’s teaching apprenticeship has been so successful in large part due to its “no leaky pipeline” approach, which targets students coming from every academic level. She plans to mimic the same with the tile apprenticeship program.
“We want to develop the entire pipeline of workforce development, whether it’s straight-from-high-school or [they] have two degrees and a career,” she says. “A lot of states target one group, like just high schoolers or just career changers—but in our approach, regardless of the starting point, we have an entry point for you.”
The program will be a mix of recent high school graduates and those currently working within the industry, who could use the degree to further their career. The program will be designed to account for manufacturing worker’s nontraditional work hours.
“We’ve got some guys that we really feel they can develop into strong leaders, but they do not currently have the educational piece—which is not an absolute requirement—but it does raise their ceiling, definitely, for growth potential,” Nielson says.
Crisp’s ultimate goal is to serve 15K students across the state in manufacturing apprenticeship and “apprenticeship-like programs.” She pointed toward a UK-based study that found that 30% of students would pursue apprenticeship if it were available in the subjects they’re interested in. (Roughly 20% of the students across the UT system would be around 15K students).
“In the back of my mind that’s a North Star,” she says. “That would be evidence we’re meeting the needs of our learners.”
A Growing Effort Across the Country
The UT system joins other higher education systems getting similar backing from their state governments. Indiana and Alabama launched new manufacturing apprenticeship programs in 2020 and 2021, respectively. The former is backed by a $10M initiative, dubbed the Economic Activity Stabilization and Enhancement, or EASE, project, focused on boosting technology and operational advancements with the manufacturing industry. The latter is the Alabama Initiative on Manufacturing Development and Education, centered on making manufacturing modernization a new focus at the University of Alabama.
California, which has the largest number of manufacturing apprentices, launched its Industrial Manufacturing Technician (IMT) apprenticeship program in 2023, buoyed by a $480M, three-year initiative with the goal of producing 500K apprentices across a wide range of fields by 2029.
Other efforts are industry-led. The State University of New York system partnered with the Manufacturers Alliance of New York in 2017, creating a model that brings together a range of employers across the state. It streamlines an otherwise daunting process for many, creating a single intermediary that serves as an entry point for companies and coordinates with state bureaucracies on their behalf.
“The group sponsorship model satiates the needs of a lot of businesses,” Chris White, SUNY’s vice chancellor for workforce development and upward mobility, says. “Working with the state, trying to register a program—especially for businesses trying to run day-to-day operations —could be a bit of a struggle. The model group can aid them, bring in partners like SUNY and flesh out a robust model.”
Program Wins, Potential Hurdles
Apprenticeship programs have had a roughly 88% growth over the last decade, according to the Department of Labor, totalling more than 679K apprenticeship participants in the 2024 fiscal year. And 96,500 were in advanced manufacturing.
But that still remains quite small relative to the labor market’s need and the 16M students enrolled in two-year and four-year degree programs. For many workers and learners, a lack of program offerings isn’t the issue. Awareness is.
“If every college today said, ‘We have the right skills and the right curriculum,’ that does not change anything about students’ awareness of the program and aptitude to take on those,” the Manufacturing Institute’s Davis says. “Manufacturing is a lot like the boogeyman. It’s scary because you don’t know what’s in that nondescript building at the edge of town. We’ve got to get better.”
While participation in apprenticeships has increased across the nation, usually due to word-of-mouth awareness, Davis and Weiss both pointed to the cycle that children will typically follow the same path of their parents—which, for many, means pursuing a four-year degree regardless of their actual desire.
But federal and state investments to boost manufacturing programs could, in turn, raise awareness in K-12 of potential pathways, by facilitating classroom discussions and manufacturing facility tours.
“A lot of students don’t feel motivated to choose any sort of productive pathway because it feels inaccessible to them,” says UT’s Crisp, a former high school teacher. “I know if I had this option to talk to them about this for their life after high school, so many of them would be excited to join the workforce and get a degree at the same time.”
The industry’s crux to overcome is the stereotype of a manufacturing plant—those interviewed brought up the “I Love Lucy” conveyor belt scene and the sitcom “Laverne and Shirley,” in which the two title characters work in a bottle factory. But today’s manufacturing is much more about running the computers that drive modern machine tools, or CNC machines, and increasingly robots.
“I do think there’s a lot more that needs to happen in terms of career awareness,” Weiss says. “Advanced manufacturing facilities are incredibly clean; it’s not the image people have in their head. And for young people, it’s exciting to see how manufacturing contributes to a green economy.”
Program popularity could continue to rise as Gen Z continues to enter the workforce. The generation—which has a dipping opinion of traditional higher education—has been dubbed the “tool belt generation,” drawn toward the rising pay and new technologies in hands-on careers like manufacturing and plumbing.
“The hands-on work is instant gratification,” White says. “There is the theory stuff you have to learn, but you’re seeing the fruits of your labor in real time.”
Looking Forward: But while apprenticeships have long been lauded across both sides of the political aisle, there is a tentative question mark on the future of funding.
Career civil servants, including those at the Department of Labor, have been slashed in recent months by President Trump’s focus on reducing the size and cost of the federal workforce (though roughly 120 DoL employees were reinstated last month). Key personnel in the Office of Apprenticeship, including the longtime administrator, have left or been let go.
And, as Work Shift previously reported, several apprenticeship-focused research studies have shuttered, alongside the elimination of federal grants for some high-profile teacher apprenticeships.
Crisp says the excitement for the UT manufacturing apprenticeship program is palpable, though focus is a challenge with so many moving parts and uncertainty at the federal level.
“There have been federally-funded apprenticeship programs that have been paused, cancelled, reinstated,” she says. “There’s uncertainty because things federally are hard to predict right now. But my standard answer is apprenticeship tends to be bipartisan so it feels secure.”