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In May 2025, Apple released its quarterly earnings, revealing that they had exceeded nearly every analyst’s expectations. The company beat Wall Street’s best guess for iPhone sales by $800 million, and overall revenue was nearly $1 billion more than projected. Their service division even generated its highest-ever quarterly revenue. Yet Apple saw its stock price slip by three percent. Despite further cementing itself as one of the surest corporate bets, investors were left disappointed.
This is a familiar pattern for the tech titan. In 2024, Apple also saw its shares tumble despite greater than anticipated revenue. The story was the same in 2023. Despite its humble beginnings, Apple’s current blue-chip status means that they can no longer satisfy the market by simply meeting or exceeding expectations — it has to blow them impossibly out of the water. Tim Cook, the C-suite Sisyphus.
Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs), the U.S.’s premier workforce development strategy, have faced much the same predicament in the recent past. For nearly a century after their introduction, RAPs developed a reliable pipeline of skilled workers across the trades. Until 2015, the federal government spent only about $30 million per year on apprenticeships, a significant portion of which was used to simply pay the salaries of a handful of Department of Labor staff. But soon thereafter, the floodgates began to crack open.
U.S. annual apprenticeship funding doubled from $90 million in 2016 to $185 million in 2021. Much of this investment has attempted to increase apprenticeship opportunities in emerging industries such as information technology, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing.
As expected, this monetary support led to apprenticeship expansion. While there was a significant dip in the overall number of new apprentices in 2020-21 (coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic), the number of non-construction apprentices has more than doubled since 2010. Additionally, between 1999 and 2019, the proportion of non-construction apprentices grew from 27 to 42 percent of the total.
However, like Apple, this unprecedented growth still falls short of satisfying analysts. Within the U.S., Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs) continue to represent a tiny fraction of the overall workforce — just 0.3% percent — but as the capacity to be much, much greater. According to research from Multiverse, up to 4.5% of job openings annually could be in “apprenticeable” occupations, representing more than 830,000 new opportunities each year. A 2017 study from Harvard University supports these findings, estimating nearly 3.2 million job openings across the country that could be filled by apprenticeships.
Global apprenticeship comparisons with peer nations paint an even more disappointing picture. Canada’s apprenticeships make up approximately 2 percent of its workforce; for the US to reach that level, it would need to multiply its existing programs 6.5 times over. In Switzerland, about one-third of all companies take on apprentices; in the U.S., less than 1% do. What is perhaps most disheartening is that despite the significant increase in funding, the U.S. still falls far short of other countries that embrace apprenticeships. For example, to proportionally match Canada’s annual outlay of $1 billion, the U.S. would have to contribute more than $8 billion. Registered Apprenticeship’s growth in the U.S. has been somehow both unprecedented and insufficient.
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Registered Apprenticeship’s growth in the U.S. has been somehow both unprecedented and insufficient.
Given this evidence, many in the workforce world believe that the solution to achieving the same success as apprenticeship powerhouse countries is to increase funding. But more money doesn’t always directly translate to more apprentices or better quality programs. Take for example the England’s Apprenticeship Levy, a tax introduced to support apprenticeship programs across industries. Immediately after the Levy began, decline in the number of new apprentices, despite the program raising nearly 3 billion GBP in its first year.
What’s the cause of this disparity? It’s because apprenticeship funding in the U.S. is just one part of the larger puzzle. As apprenticeship expert and evangelist Robert Lerman writes:
Funding for apprenticeships can be inflexible, only available for certain participants at certain times in certain industries in certain parts of the country. (The British Chamber of Commerce cited this as a primary reason for companies’ hesitancy to expand apprenticeships.) Given that huge swaths of federal funding are distributed by state agencies and local Workforce Development Boards — all of whom have different priorities and procedures — it can also be inconsistent from one state to the next. Colorado, for instance, provides nearly $13,000 to businesses for every apprentice they hire, whereas its neighbor Utah has no apprenticeship-specific tax credit whatsoever. With block grants, the money will eventually run out, leaving employers and apprentices in the lurch. And, as the current administration has shown, even a signed contract doesn’t mean the funding will be paid out.
So, what factors — besides cash — lead to a robust apprenticeship ecosystem? And how do we replicate this in the US?
First is ease of use. No matter how much U.S. apprenticeship funding is on offer, employers will rarely adopt a program that is overly complex, burdensome, or finicky — and right now, Registered Apprenticeship can be all that and more. The inconsistencies within the US system mean that most companies need expert organizations (called “intermediaries”) to help them design & implement an apprenticeship program. Modernizing and simplifying the system to something resembling the German Dual VET framework would entice more employers to take the plunge, and keep more of them onboard by reducing their administrative & regulatory burdens. Technological solutions like ApprentiScope can also help facilitate administrative and logistical tasks, resulting in better outcomes for employers and apprentices alike.
Second is shifting cultural perception. If apprenticeship isn’t viewed as a viable and valuable career pathway, it will never become a mainstream workforce development practice in the U.S. Countries like Switzerland and Germany have a history of formal apprenticeship dating back centuries. In modern times, this has resulted in corporate giants like UBS and Volkswagen counting former apprentices among their Chief Executives. Across the Atlantic, we have pushed the “college for all” mentality to its breaking point such that 69% of parents who feel post-secondary education isn’t worth it still want their own child to go. Entering the workforce through on-the-job training must become a norm, not a maligned exception, for apprenticeship to take root. We can take inspiration from Australia’s Apprenticeship Ambassador Program, launched by the government in 2012 to increase the appeal of apprenticeships via events, media, and shareable success stories.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must realize that apprenticeship is not the solution for all of our workforce woes. In their excellent study, “People and Policy”, authors Maia Chankseliani, Ewart Keep, and Stephanie Wilde highlight how apprenticeship is often framed as a cure-all for ill-defined and sweeping policy issues: Apprenticeship is not a form of policy “magic dust” that can be sprinkled over a range of problems. It is essential to be clear what role(s) [it] is meant to play.
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Apprenticeship is not a form of policy “magic dust” that can be sprinkled over a range of problems. It is essential to be clear what role(s) [it] is meant to play.
In part as a result of its push for rapid expansion, the U.S. apprenticeship system makes liberal use of this policy “magic dust”. Currently, it offers Pre-Apprenticeship, Youth Apprenticeship, and Registered Apprenticeship as work-based learning options, all of which are meant to serve different audiences at different stages in their career to solve different workforce problems. International examples show us, however, that clearly and narrowly defining the purpose of apprenticeship can be incredibly impactful. In Finland, where the main purpose of apprenticeship is to serve diverse communities, completion rates are nearly 20% higher than in the US. In Germany, which has a much smaller set of apprenticeship occupations, it was only after much consideration, deliberation, and engagement with the business community that an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) apprenticeship was developed. Despite the limited scope, the program has been incredible successful and is leveraged by companies including Vodafone and T-Mobile. These approaches were successful not because of sheer volume, but because they met a specific and urgent policy need.
It’s evident that U.S. apprenticeship funding alone will not build an effective workforce development strategy. The Trump administration has called for hiring one million new apprentices, but as demonstrated above, exponential growth is necessarily not a beneficial aim. Like Apple, smashing expectations won’t necessarily help (or even improve) apprenticeships’ long-term goals or staying power. The search for funding — trying to pry open the federal government’s increasingly impenetrable cash register — is growing futile. Instead, let’s unlock apprenticeship’s potential by improving its infrastructure, enhancing its public reputation, and narrowing its policy aims.
