SPRINGDALE -- Many employers are turning to apprenticeships to help fill positions, state officials said Thursday at a forum for business owners and human resource professionals.
Lee Price, Arkansas' director of the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Apprenticeship and Training, told about 150 attendees there are tax and other financial incentives for businesses setting up apprenticeship programs.
"The big incentive, though, is that you are training the person that you eventually will have as an employee, and you're training them the way you want to," Price said.
Apprenticeships, traditionally associated mainly with trades such as plumbing and carpentry, are becoming increasingly common across a variety of other career fields, officials said.
Price works with companies to establish programs tailored to each company's needs. He helps write the standards each apprentice must meet. Most programs take one to four years to complete, all while making salaries that can exceed $70,000 per year, he said.
The number of apprentices in Arkansas has grown from 3,200 to nearly 6,000 and the number of apprenticeship programs has grown from 83 to 130 in the past four years, Price said.
Paul Kanneman, an executive vice president and chief information officer at Simmons Bank, recalled when the bank had to fill a lot of positions at once -- positions requiring unique skill sets. The bank had to go outside Arkansas to find people for those jobs, which cost at least $50,000 per hire, he said.
That forced the bank to examine an apprenticeship program.
"For that same $50,000, or less than that ... I can hire people from within the state that know us, and I can mold that person along the way to say, this is really what we need, for not only the technology skill set, but for who we are as a bank," Kanneman said.
Kanneman was part of a panel at the forum hosted by the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services.
Royshawn McClain, a computer science major at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, landed an apprenticeship with Simmons Bank in February.
McClain, 19, acknowledged a frustration familiar to many adults: you need experience to get a job, but you also need a job to get experience.
"With this apprenticeship, it has really helped me get a head start on that experience so I can get a job and pursue my future career," he said.
Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, a speaker at Thursday's forum, spoke excitedly about the potential of the programs to boost the state's economy.
Decades ago, the primary way of learning a job was through an apprenticeship, but as postsecondary academic institutions grew in prominence, the concept went to the wayside, he said.
"We just waited for the institutions, the government, to provide the workers," Griffin said. "Well, that doesn't work in a very, very fast-moving, dynamic, complex economy."
Apprenticeships give power to companies, because "instead of getting a cookie-cutter trained individual, you're going to get exactly what you need" in terms of employee skills, Griffin said.
NW News on 04/26/2019