Marek Laco answers questions about the administration’s goal to hit 1M registered apprentices and shares thoughts on the progress to date. Also, views from across the pond on the U.S. push for apprenticeship degrees, an idea for tapping Labor Department data to spur innovation, and Bill Gates on reserving jobs for humans. (Subscribe here.)

1M Apprentices, Two Years to Go

President Trump issued an executive order in April of 2025 that set a goal of reaching 1M new active apprentices in the registered system. It was one of a slew of such orders in the administration’s first 100 days, and was generally met with enthusiasm among workforce development pros.

Quickly though, there were questions about what precisely the target was, how the administration would back it up amid a push to cut the U.S. Department of Labor’s budget and staff—and, as the months wore on, whether the goal had been softened.

In an interview with Work Shift, Marek Laco, acting assistant secretary of the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration, addressed those questions and shared his perspective on progress to date. He acknowledged that the executive order says “new active apprentices,” a combination of the terms for newly enrolled apprentices and those who are actively participating in a program at any point in time.

But Laco says that the department has from the beginning focused on hitting 1M total active apprentices—including both new and continuing ones—by the end of Trump’s term. And despite lingering questions, he says, that goal isn’t changing.

“Even if you look back, I’d say the goal hasn’t evolved,” Laco says. “Our primary focus has been on a million active apprentices.”

That’s an ambitious target, experts say. When the goal was set, the system was sitting at 679K active apprentices after a decade of growth.

Taking Stock: About 16 months later, registered apprenticeships have continued to grow, but at a slower rate than pre-pandemic. The country had just over 700K active apprentices at the end of the last fiscal year, growth that mostly came from a drop in the number of apprentices leaving before the end of their program. The number of new apprentices actually dipped for the first time since the pandemic.

The total number of active apprentices is now up to 714K. New apprentices are down again, as of June, but that could change as data arrives for the final three months of the federal fiscal year. If the growth trend of the past few years continues, the administration would come up about 150K apprentices short, even if the timeline is extended to 2030, according to a recent analysis by Jobs for the Future.

Laco says the Labor Department expects a combination of moves made in the last year to shift that trajectory. That includes regulatory and funding changes designed to:

“The clear directive we got is we have to move faster,” Laco says. “We’ve had successes, but scale is what’s needed.”

Laco says that to reach scale, the department is focused on expanding into less traditional industries and jobs, and then getting repeat buy-in from employers. To do that you have to entice more companies to try out apprenticeships, he says. That’s the idea behind a new $162M pay-for-performance fund, which rerouted many existing apprenticeship dollars into incentive payments for employers, and an earlier cooperative agreement with Arkansas focused on advanced manufacturing nationwide.

“Employers generally like the model,” Laco says. “Once they do it, more often than not, they stick with it; they see value in doing it.”

In addition to Arkansas, the department inked cooperative agreements with five other organizations to manage the pay-for-performance funds and provide incentives for employers across the country to hire apprentices. They’ll be testing out different models to see what incentive structures work best in various industries, including shipbuilding, telecommunications, and automotive tech. 

Laco demurred on whether the department sees this as a pilot that could lead to more substantial, ongoing pay-for-performance funding in the future. The current money is slated to be distributed for four years.

“We are very focused on using existing funding as effectively as possible,” Laco says.

For Jobs for the Future—which will manage $40M of the pay-for-performance funds—that means a particular focus on improving persistence and completion among apprentices. The national completion rate for registered apprenticeship currently sits at 46.5%, and the group’s recent analysis estimates that boosting that by 10 percentage points would add 37K active apprentices per year.

“In our approach, completion, quality, and persistence are key,” says Myriam Sullivan, associate vice president of JFF’s Center for Apprenticeship & Work-Based Learning.

Money and Markets

Deborah Kobes, senior fellow for apprenticeship and workforce at the Urban Institute, agrees that boosting completion is a “clever and thoughtful” way to look at growing the system. 

“One of the big barriers is getting more employers engaged—that up-front hump of getting an employer to the table,” she says. “If you can have strategies like increasing completion rates that keep employers at the table, that’s good.”

Research has also shown that pay-for-performance incentives, specifically, can be effective. But Kobes says that for all the attention paid to the new fund, it isn’t a major departure from the past. Previous awards to intermediaries have included incentive funds for employers tied to outcomes, even if the grants weren’t called pay-for-performance.

“It does increase the amount of those incentive funds, for sure, so there is a shift in emphasis there,” she says. “But it doesn’t change the tools in the toolbox.”

And it doesn’t add new or more predictable money to the system, but repurposes the existing $285M appropriation for apprenticeship. Ultimately, Kobes says, substantial growth will require more investment—a perspective shared by JFF and groups like Apprenticeships for America.

In the short run, however, the labor market may have as much of a say as any single policy decision. When employers are uncertain and pulling back on hiring entry-level workers, they typically aren’t hiring more apprentices, either. 

“Apprenticeship is certainly facing a headwind,” Kobes says. —By Elyse Ashburn

The View from Abroad

Oxford, England—Workforce leaders increasingly talk about degree apprenticeship as part of the answer to getting registered apprenticeship to scale in the U.S. This month at the annual conference hosted by the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, representatives from universities, nonprofits, and government—mostly from the U.S.—gathered to learn about how the United Kingdom has scaled degree apprenticeships and how they might make that happen at home. 

The obstacles loom large. Leaders spoke about inconsistent or altogether missing data, a lack of research on what’s really effective, and, of course, how such degrees could be funded. In the U.K., a tax on large businesses pays for apprentices to attend university. In this country, philanthropy has so far filled that role. 

Still, at Oxford—surrounded by centuries-old architecture and renowned libraries—the feeling was mostly optimistic about transforming higher education through apprenticeship degrees—a term popularized by Reach University and an inversion of the U.K.’s degree apprenticeship to emphasize “degree.” (Ironically, Oxford University, where the conference was held, does not offer degree apprenticeships.) Reach is at the vanguard of apprenticeship degrees in the U.S. with its successful grow-your-own teacher program and the new Apprenticeship College of Health. But at least one person called for slowing down before trying to scale. 

Another official called registered apprenticeship a team sport, and apprenticeship degrees a varsity sport. For now, assembling the team is still a challenge requiring colleges, employers, and the Labor Department to work together. But if the conference, in its second year, is any indication, the seeds have been planted. —By Colleen Connolly

DOL Innovation Challenge

The Labor Department holds one of the world’s richest collections of workforce, job training, and labor market information, says John Pallasch, who was assistant secretary of labor during the first Trump administration. 

Yet that “treasury minted through decades of public investment” remains largely untapped. Pallasch proposes the department host an innovation invitational to activate the data. The competition would invite trusted organizations and experts to develop applications, tools, and insights that address critical workforce challenges.

“WIOA only provides career services to around 550K people per year and training for 180K,” Pallasch says. “We need 10x the first number and 3x the latter if we are going to address labor force participation rates and unemployment insurance issues.”

The innovation challenge concept would feature a special federal DOL drop of anonymized, participant-level records. The privacy-protected data could be used to develop predictive modeling of the ROI of training by region and population group, for example. Another possibility could be AI-driven recommendations for training or employment pathways.

“I want states and locals to be able to leverage every WIOA customer to find your digital twins, to see what worked and didn’t work for your twins,” says Pallasch, “then recommend the best path.”

What do you think of his idea? Please send thoughts my way.

Human Reserved

Bill Gates now thinks many jobs will disappear forever during the AI transition.

“We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates,” he writes in a new 6K-word essay. “Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.”

One possible solution Gates floats is to set aside some jobs for humans. Roles could be designated “human reserved” for economic and other reasons. That domain would evolve over time and vary from place to place, he writes.

Likewise, Gates says, workers will need retraining and other support from the social safety net as they are pushed into different jobs. But because people will be working less, they will pay less in income taxes. To help pay for retraining and government services, Gates says we should rebalance how we tax labor and capital. His fix includes taxing AI tokens and robots.

Gates acknowledges that a wide range of questions about his idea for human-reserved jobs would need to be hashed out in public. That could be part of the mandate for the enormously complex global and domestic systems he says we need to create, ASAP, to manage the AI transition.

Here are some other recent developments on AI and the workforce:

  • Claude usage data shows workers in AI-exposed occupations are experiencing slower wage growth while employment levels in those occupations remain unchanged, according to an analysis from Apollo Global Management. The findings suggest companies are capturing AI productivity gains through wage compression rather than workforce reduction.
  • Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI and concerned the tech will take jobs, finds a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Almost three-quarters (73%) of respondents under 30 now say AI will lead to fewer jobs, up from 61% two years ago.

Open Tabs

Supports and Wages
The City University of New York’s successful ASAP program, which offers comprehensive student support, has served more than 100K students. Over a 14-year period it increased degree completion by eight percentage points, found a study by MDRC. Yet ASAP produced no measurable impact on wages or employment. The puzzling contrast to the completion benefits raises questions about how credentials translate into economic opportunity.

Biomanufacturing Hubs
Two-year colleges are turning federal industrial policy into upward mobility, Jeremy Ney, a former economic policymaker at the Federal Reserve, writes for New America. CHIPS and the Tech Hubs program are driving the development of biomanufacturing hubs, creating well-paying, stable career tracks for entry-level workers without four-year degrees. For example, a biohealth tech hub in Wisconsin could create 30K direct jobs with an average annual wage of $96K.

Short-Term Credentials
States are moving beyond simply increasing short-term workforce credential attainment to ensure those credentials lead to good jobs, higher wages, and long-term career mobility, writes journalist Kathleen Kennedy Manzo in three profiles of states participating in the Lumina Foundation’s FutureReady States initiative. Connecticut, for example, is using a statewide credential-of-value definition to strengthen and align its workforce development ecosystem.

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