The federal government is backing a new initiative focused on helping states get on the same page about apprenticeship—including what count as high-demand jobs and what people need to know to do them. 

The idea is to make it easier for companies, colleges, and intermediaries to operate apprenticeship programs across state lines. And for learners to be able to apprentice in a state like Indiana but land a job in Ohio. Right now, the registered apprenticeship system is too disjointed and opaque for that to reliably be the case.

“The credential you earn at the end might as well just say ‘Credential’ on a piece of paper because it doesn’t mean anything,” says Josh Laney, who will be heading up the new project. “People need to see what’s behind it.”

The Details: The initiative, the National Project on Apprenticeship Standards and Interoperability (PASI), has $12.5M in federal funding through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor and will run for four years. The work will be led by the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), in partnership with the Alabama Commission on Higher Education.

A related initiative, led out of Colorado, will focus on expanding pre-apprenticeship and better integrating those programs with career technical education in high school and with postsecondary education.

Specific goals for PASI include:

  • Developing occupation-specific frameworks for quality on-the-job training, related technical instruction, and the skills acquired during an apprenticeship that could be adopted across states.
  • Understanding and articulating the competencies embedded in apprenticeship programs to better align them with traditional higher education—better enabling degree apprenticeships or allowing learners to stack credentials.
  • Further developing and improving the federal database of approved apprenticeship programs to create a clearer hierarchy of best-in-class approaches that are accepted in a wide number of states.

Laney, a well-known leader in the apprenticeship field, left the Alabama Office of Apprenticeship to head up the new initiative and to grow C-BEN’s footprint in work-based learning more broadly. PASI will build on the organization’s existing work helping states, including Tennessee and Washington, expand apprenticeships in high-need fields like teaching and integrate them with degree programs. C-BEN also was integral in helping Alabama build its skills-based talent marketplace.

“The registered apprenticeship work is nested under a broader work-embedded learning strategy,” says Lisa McIntyre-Hite, executive vice president and chief operating officer at C-BEN. “We want to enable a skills-based ecosystem that can acknowledge your competencies regardless of where they’re learned or earned.”

Fed Strategy: The new initiative comes amid mixed signals from the Trump administration on apprenticeship. The president has called for the United States to reach 1M apprentices a year, up from about 700K today, and has emphasized the value of registered programs—but the President’s budget did not call for any increase in funding. And apprenticeship grants have been axed as part of the administration’s anti-DEI purge and wider cost cutting, as have staff in the Labor Department.

One thing is clear across the administration’s moves though: an expectation that states step up and play a bigger role in apprenticeship.

The Model: Laney’s been there. He led Alabama’s move from federal management of apprenticeship to a state-led system, and he believes that model can be more responsive to regional needs and to smaller employers. Alabama was selected to partner in the new federal project in large part because of its experience deciding how to prioritize apprenticeship funding.

The new initiative will build off the state’s five-part test for identifying jobs that are both high-demand and provide economic mobility, and it will offer states, intermediaries, and registration agencies a clearer framework for prioritizing and evaluating apprenticeship investments. 

“Nationally, no such thing exists,” Laney says. “We’re going to quarterback the process of getting all the states together and essentially arguing until we’re satisfied about, ‘What is a high-impact job?’”

States won’t be required to follow the guidance on in-demand jobs or training standards coming out of PASI, but Laney hopes many will since they’ll be invested in the process. Greater coordination is needed, he says, to provide clarity to employers, colleges and other training providers, and learners themselves.

“If we don’t have a consistent framework we’re all operating in, the state-led effort is going to blow up in our faces,” he says.