When it's time to register your apprenticeship program, one of the first questions you'll encounter is whether you want to run a time vs competency (and hybrid) program.
The next question is often, what does that even mean?
Lucky for you, we've already written an article on the differences between time, competency, and hybrid apprenticeship approaches. The question being asked is whether you want to measure your apprentices progress, particularly their on-the-job training (OJT) progress, baed on time spent on tasks, mastery of a skill, or both.
The real question, however, is why you would want to choose any of those three options.
Why Time Apprenticeships
Time-based apprenticeships are the OG of apprenticeships. Every apprenticeship, historically, was a time-based apprenticeship. To this day, you may not have any option but a time-based apprenticeship depending on your trade and your location.
The vast majority of building trades apprenticeships continue to be time-based apprenticeships. If you're running an apprenticeship program for electricians almost anywhere in the country, it's likely you're running an 8,000 time-based program.
Your apprentices will do some breakdown of hours similar to the following work process category breakdown:
Preliminary Work - 600 hours
Rough-in Wiring - 4,000 hours
Finish Work - 2,000 hours
Troubleshooting and service - 1,000 hours
Motors - 400 hours
There's some variance in the distribution and categories, but with time-based programs, you're demonstrating the priority of the work processes based on time needed. After 4,000 hours of rough-in wiring, it's likely your apprentice has spent sufficient time on a variety of situations that they're journey-able in that part of the job.
To launch a time-based apprenticeship, you often have a relatively easy exercise of just following what some other program has done previously, or, taking the total hours and working with your state or local agency to change the distribution a bit to categories of your choosing.
Now, you'd choose time-based if you have to, as described above, but you'll also choose this if it's good enough to know they've spent time in an area. There's no guarantee they've seen everything, but it's close.
Time-based programs tend to be easier to track. There's certainly some art to dividing your work into pre-built categories, but it's on the apprentice to keep track and supervisors typically simply approve the distribution across a few categories each week or month.
Why Not Time Apprenticeships
Why wouldn't you want time-based apprenticeships? There's no guarantee that your apprentice is actually capable in everything that might come under, say, those 4,000 hours of Rough-in Wiring.
It is possible they spend 80% of that time doing 1 particular type of work that their crew happens to do all the time, and there's a whole bunch of other types they're not seeing.
You might not want time-based programs if the idea of tracking hours sounds incredibly onerous, too, because you already track payroll. You already track hours for work orders. This is a third way of tracking hours and it's all just too confusing for your staff. So you look for a new category... competency-baed apprenticeships.
Why Competency Apprenticeships
Competency-based apprenticeships were started to address that lack of a guarantee. With competency-based programs, you know for sure that your apprentices can do each and every single skill required on the job because you've had to make a list of every single skill on the job as part of registering.
Competency-based apprenticeships are majorly en vogue with newer apprenticeships, particularly in newer industries, as they're less concerned with time spent to master a skill.
If you can learn the 5 skills in a particular category in 2,000 hours instead of 4,000 hours, why do you need another 2,000?
Competency-based programs deliver that guarantee that your apprentices can do everything.
Why Not Competency Apprenticeships
Why wouldn't you want a competency-based apprenticeship? There's a few reasons.
First, there may not be an existing competency model for your occupation. Sticking with electrician, for example, if you want competency-based apprenticeship, and your state has never done one before, you're signing up for more of a process. Approving the first competency-based program sets a standard for future programs so it's a much more thorough review process for the state agency and for your organization.
You'll need to survey the workers on your team to build out a list of skills from scratch. You'll need to get your agency to agree. They'll want to bring in other industry voices. It just adds time to the process of launching your program.
Now, this is increasingly less of a problem. There are many more competency-based apprenticeships today, and from efforts by PASI and the Urban Institute with National Occupational Frameworks, more to come.
However, you still might not want to do a competency-based program. It puts more of the onus of responsibility on your supervisors. They're the ones tracking progress now, more than approving hours. They're having to review a list of skills often dozens of line long, rather than just a few hours categories. It requires more of their time and attention. Apprentices are almost passive in their progress tracking.
Additionally, increasingly, you're going to have to track some hours. To standardize across competency and time-based programs, increasingly most competency programs are what we'd call light hybrid. You need to track total hours -- not by category -- and competencies to ensure completion is standardized across different types of apprenticeships.
That leads us to hybrid, in general.
Why Hybrid Apprenticeships
Hybrid apprenticeships check off all the boxes. Your apprentices will be tracked based on competency completion AND a distribution of hours. Your apprentices will have sufficient time experience to say they've truly covered a work process category and validation from supervisors that they can do the skills required of the job.
Hybrid apprenticeships, like time apprenticeships, require the apprentices to track hours so they're more actively involved in measuring their own progress. They also require supervisors to assess competency completion so they're less passively simply approving hours.
Now, the thing about hybrid apprenticeships, too, is that you may formally register as either competency or time-based, and still run your program as as hybrid apprenticeship. For example, say you want to register an apprenticeship in an occupation that doesn't yet have an approved competency list already. Or, maybe you're in a state where competencies haven't yet taken off. Rather than delay the launch of your apprenticeship by having to make that change formal, you can register a time-based program and simply track competencies, too. If you want to formalize, you can even continue the process of registering the hybrid while unblocking your entire program to run as a formal time-based, but informal hybrid in the meantime.
This also works out great for existing licensed occupations in teaching and medical fields. Often, there's an existing competency list that has to be completed as part of a separate, non-apprenticeship license -- say a teaching or medical assistant license. Register as a time-based program today. Run it as an informal hybrid program immediately to check off the apprenticeship need (time-based) AND the license need (competency-based). Later, if you decide its worth it, work with your state agency to formalize the hybrid program.
Why Not Hybrid Apprenticeships
Why not hybrid is hopefully a bit obvious.
You're signing up to do double the tracking work when you may not need to. The thing about apprentice data is that the workload really scales quickly. 10 apprentices with 100 competencies and 10 work processes can yield a lot of tracking work -- potentially weekly time cards, monthly competency evaluations. In a single small program, you're looking at potentially 40 time cards per month and 10 evaluations with 1,000 competencies assessed. When your program doubles, tripes, quadruples in size, you're going to find the inefficiencies very, very quickly.
If that sounds like a bad fit, choose time or competency-based.
Conclusion
There is no single right answer here. At WorkHands, when we register our internal apprenticeships, we always register hybrid. Why? It's a test of our entire team and platform. Not every programs needs or wants that.
The answer depends on your desire for specificity in training, ability to absorb tracking workload, the options at your disposal in your state, your need for an additional license along with the apprenticeship, and a whole bunch of other factors.
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