The Registered Apprenticeship Standards Library at apprenticeshipstandards.org

At WorkHands, our sole mission is to make apprenticeship simpler. We've talked a little bit about why it's complicated -- from a multi-part agreement, government regulation, industry jargon, and state specificity. Apprenticeship is complicated. The bulk of our work on making apprenticeship simpler occurs on workhands.com, but our mission is broader than that. That's why, for the past four years, we worked with the Urban Institute on the Registered Apprenticeship Standards Library at apprenticeshipstandards.org.

Background

During the Biden administration, there were groups formed called Centers of Excellence for improving apprenticeship in several different areas:

1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

2. Data and Performance

3. Strategic Partnerships

4. Occupations and Standards

The Urban Institute led the Occupations and Standards group.

Goals

The Urban Institute led the Occupations and Standards group with two main goals -- 1, to create a series of occupational frameworks that are all encompassing and a gold standard for defining competencies for close to 80 occupations and 2, to create the Registered Apprenticeship Standards Library at apprenticeshipstandards.org.

The goal of the Registered Apprenticeship Standards Library was to create a single repository of apprenticeship standards organized by state, industry, type of on-the-job training, and more.

Apprenticeship Standards

We wrote a whole article on what registered apprenticeship standards are so that's a great place to start. Essentially, they're the template for your entire apprenticeship program -- what apprentices will do on the job, in the classroom, what they'll earn, how they're selected, etc. The specifics of the terms of apprenticeship standards are covered separately. You can even read how to create apprenticeship standards using apprenticeship.gov and Standards Builder.

In short, apprenticeship standards are at the core of apprenticeships, but historically, they've lived in file systems and Dropbox folders. If you wanted to see an example of what an apprenticeship could look like in your industry, you had to connect right the right person who could share one of the PDFs or Word documents that are the foundation of the industry. To solve this, you need to digitize all of those PDFs and documents into something searchable. You need to standardize these documents across various different state and federal templates as well as various ways that programs fill up a blank page to define them.

Our experience

We were really excited to tackle this project with the Urban Institute because we lived the problem of apprenticeship standards from multiple angles. As the providers of WorkHands tracking platform, we digitize apprenticeship standards nearly every day. We've come up with a rubric for how to handle competencies written in tables, with sub categories, bullets, etc. When given a blank page to fill in your work process schedule, programs can and do find every possible variance for writing similar information. We've made a business of standardizing it.

In addition, WorkHands runs internal apprenticeships. To do this, we, like our clients, are apprenticeship sponsors. Before we registered, we asked friends of WorkHands for examples of running their standards. We looked over about half a dozen software apprenticeships before finding language for competencies and related instruction that matched our own. That ability to browse through multiple examples is core to the solution we sought for any program.

Result

WorkHands worked with the Urban Institute as its core partner to build the library, but we also worked with the Department of Labor's Office of Apprenticeship, various state apprenticeship agencies (remember OA vs SAA), and a whole host of other partners to build the library you see today.

You can now search and find apprenticeship standards by state, by industry, by occupation, and by keyword. The RASL holds over 2,000+ apprenticeship standards with many more in the queue to be included. The RASL helps combine similar standards so you're not looking at the same version over and over again. The RASL makes it possible to see both work process schedules and related instruction outlines for your desired apprenticeship. You can see what it'd look like to run your apprenticeship as a time-based apprenticeship versus a competency or hybrid apprenticeship.

If a standard doesn't pass the federal requirements, the system highlights that (it may pass for your state!). You can finally see what it really looks to run an apprenticeship with real, verified, registered apprenticeships.

Who is the target

To start, apprenticeshipstandards.org is for the power users. If you're just starting a single apprenticeship, your Apprenticeship Training Representative (ATR) may have exactly what you need already -- a fully standardized work process schedule you can follow. However, if you need to shop around like us, now you can do so using a variety of examples across state and industry lines. In fact, we hear increasingly that apprenticeshipstandards.org is a core resource for many ATRs. Prior to the RASL, we heard from many ATRs that, if they didn't have an example of an occupation an employer wanted, they had to email other ATRs all over the country to see if they could share something. Beyond that, if you're an intermediary, you have a nearly never ending supply of standards now to add industries to your portfolio.

What's next

At its core, the RASL specializes in taking whats in documents and organizing it for the web. This is still a heavily manual process, but we have plans to change that. We have plans to bring some authority over which standards are the gold standard for each state and industry, and a whole bunch more. Keep an eye out here, and we'll let you know how the project evolves!