WorkHands Engineering 2025 Review

This is the first in a new series where you can hear direct from the WorkHands engineering team about what we're prioritizing. It takes a lot of work to make apprenticeship simpler -- here's a window into what that looks like.

2025 Overview

Regardless of the year, our focus at WorkHands is on making apprenticeship simpler.

Sometimes, making apprenticeship simpler means doing more for our clients. One of the major themes with our clients this year has been the desire for one platform to rule them all (our precious...).

The challenge for engineering is, as always, how do we add to the platform without taking away from our core goal -- simplicity. This means new options shouldn't add too many additional steps to the UI. This means old features still work with the new. This means the site is faster. This means the site is more reliable.

Here's some of the highlights from that effort.

Recruiting+ into WorkHands+

This summer we launched Recruiting+ to give our clients a single place where they could support their apprentices from the moment they applied all the way through completion. This includes:

• Free and paid options for sharing openings to your program

• Custom application forms to reflect program-specific application needs

• Support for multiple employers recruiting within a single program

• Simplified the Applicant → Apprentice transition to streamline onboarding

Additional Roles & Access

Next up, one of our biggest efforts of the year! For most of WorkHands existence, you had a single role -- an apprentice, a supervisor, or an admin. We felt the strain of that limitation over the past couple years as apprentices graduated and became supervisors, client needs grew, and our own Recruiting+ launch meant we'd have applicants transitioning to apprentices.

To support this, we added the following

• New role types like Advisors, Moderators, and Team Leads

• Supervisors got more nuanced filtering so options could show only their assigned or all int he company

• The ability to have multiple roles so WorkHands supported the life cycle of the relationship

• Improved Instructor roles to allow more program flexibility

More Reliable Data

As WorkHands became more the source of record over the years, data consistency became more and more important. Over time, we had some screens where we showed a rounded number while our database stored a more exact number. This year, we really focused on standardizing and making that progress data more reliable.

• Progress calculations reflect approved data only and at the same number of decimals everywhere

• Improved time card entry rules and calculations to avoid unrealistic data

• New and improved reports, including OATS, Employer Evaluation, and Completed Courses

• Improved consistency and filtering across reports

• More wage tracking details -- additional dates, consistent decimals

Security, Stability and Performance

This is the stuff that, when done well, our clients should never notice. WorkHands codebase is constantly monitored for potential critical updates. WorkHands has various benchmarks for page load times. As more of you rely on WorkHands, these quiet obsessions have become more critical to get right.

• A massive increase in the number of tests that we run before any update to our application to avoid improvements in one area breaking something elsewhere

• Performance targeting our top 10 slowest requests to Improved page loads of critical screens

• Large investments in mobile app stability

• Added multi-factor authentication (MFA) support for authenticator applications

• Annual penetration tests and compliance monitoring

Looking Ahead

So much of what we invested in for 2025 is going to allow us to move faster in 2026.

With better tests, we're more confident in new releases. With better performance monitoring, we know our application has all of the latest security patches. With more nuanced role support, we can handle almost anything that comes your way.

So what's really next?

We're focused on continuing to build around the desire for the all-in-one application you all seek. It's what truly can make apprenticeship simpler.

With over 700+ apprenticeships programs, however, one program's all-in-one is not the same as the other. Getting that right is just the type of problem we live for!