Apprenticeship Intermediary Initiative in New Hampshire

With an energetic team of about a dozen full-time staff, ApprenticeshipNH builds apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship offerings in five broad industry sectors, including programs in health care, business, and hospitality as well as the more traditional skilled trades occupations of construction and automotive technology. ApprenticeshipNH staff members develop program standards, register the standards with the federal Office of Apprenticeship, and deliver related technical instruction (RTI), the classroom component of apprenticeships. They conduct outreach to prospective apprentices and apprentice employers. ApprenticeshipNH works with a wide spectrum of apprenticeship employers, from those who already have apprenticeship offerings to those that are completely new to the model. Staff also manage compliance and performance goals for the numerous federal grants that have provided ApprenticeshipNH with the majority of its financial support since its founding.

Program-focused intermediary functions such as standards development, program registration, and RTI provision are probably the easiest for colleges to adopt, as they build on colleges’ usual work of curriculum design and education. Standards development happens in partnership with local employers, using established industry advisory boards and templates developed by DOL’s Industry Intermediaries, where available. Though CCSNH colleges do not serve as the sponsor for most of the apprenticeship programs they support (leaving that role to employers, unions, or industry associations), all of their programs are registered with DOL or, in the case of their pre-apprenticeship offerings, are developed to articulate into Registered Apprenticeships. 

With only a handful of exceptions—such as an apprenticeship for insurance associates, where classroom training is provided by an industry association—New Hampshire community colleges deliver apprentices’ RTI. This coursework is split between the college system’s credit-bearing classes and non-credit customized training, according to Anne Banks, CCSNH’s apprenticeship programs manager. “With the community college system,” she says, “we have great flexibility to build both types of coursework, or a combination of both.” It all comes down to the employer’s preference, as well as students’ interest in setting themselves up to earn degrees down the line. 

A second big part of ApprenticeshipNH’s work as an intermediary involves engaging with prospective apprentices and employer partners. In addition to helping develop program standards, the team’s work on employer engagement has an even more crucial objective: securing paid work placements for prospective apprentices. To build its roster of employers, ApprenticeshipNH has adopted a model pioneered by Apprenticeship Carolina, an early statewide apprenticeship intermediary launched in 2007 that is also housed in the state community college system.¹ Under this model, regional outreach coordinators assigned to different parts of the state reach out to local businesses with hiring needs aligned with available apprenticeship programs.

ApprenticeshipNH also advertises apprenticeship openings to local students and job seekers. Indeed, CCSNH’s students are a key value-add for New Hampshire employers as well as the central motivation for the system’s apprenticeship initiative. Faced with an aging population and a very low unemployment rate, New Hampshire businesses are keen to attract CCSNH’s students; the college system, for its part, is happy to connect its students to jobs where they can put their education to use. This is the fabled win-win-win of apprenticeship, for employers and apprentices, with another win added for the college. “It helps to improve the community college system, because we’re learning, and we’re engaging with employers,” says Banks. “We have advisory boards, but this is an active, mutually beneficial program where colleges and industry can sit down at the table together.”

Some colleges, including examples discussed later in this report, take a larger role in the apprentice placement process, assessing and pre-screening prospective apprentices. But although CCSNH offers mentorship training for participating businesses, apprentice screening is mostly left to employers. “We put the ownership on the program sponsor,” says Banks, “because they’re the ones hiring this person.” 

The first federal apprenticeship grant that CCSNH received, $2.05 million from the State Apprenticeship Expansion (SAE) awards, launched ApprenticeshipNH in 2016.² This award let ApprenticeshipNH establish its most fundamental functions of program design, employer engagement, and outreach to prospective apprentices. 

In 2019, CCSNH received a $1.3 million top-up of Apprenticeship State Expansion (ASE) funding, plus $400,000 from the Expanding Community College Apprenticeships initiative administered for the Department of Labor by the American Association for Community Colleges, which allowed expansion into the biomedical and automotive industries.³ Another $3.4 million SAE grant in 2020 brought expansion into business services as well as a new focus on youth programs.⁴ The ApprenticeshipNH, which starts with a pre-apprenticeship, allows high schoolers to start a Registered Apprenticeship as early as 12th grade in hospitality, business, and health care, as well as skilled trades such as construction and automotive technology, which have sometimes lagged behind in youth work-based learning.⁵

The 2020 SAE grant also triggered a shift away from the project-focused mindset that prevailed before. “We had three separate teams, all trying to work in the same space,” says Banks. “When we got [the 2020 SAE grant] we had to make sure we were all working as one program for employers and stakeholders, and that we weren’t seen as separate entities.” This concern will resonate with anyone who’s had to administer multiple concurrent grants. In a small state like New Hampshire, with just under 1.4 million residents, the risk of fragmentation is even more acute. 

Even through the COVID-19 pandemic, which dented demand from employers as well as apprentices, successive rounds of federal grants have allowed ApprenticeshipNH to expand while growing in sophistication. New employer partnerships and apprenticeship occupations are constantly in the works—including, most recently, a paraeducator pathway—helping CCSNH continue to grow its apprentice enrollments and registered employers to 1,167 and 63, respectively. 

But as ApprenticeshipNH has added occupations and new overlapping grants, it has also accrued new monitoring and evaluation responsibilities. “The amount of information we have to report on is impossible to manage without a good system in place,” says Tracey Jackson, who leads work on the ASE grant. For an undertaking of ApprenticeshipNH’s size, she continues, “it can’t just be Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.” Banks and Jackson say that ApprentiScope, a new case management software implemented with ApprenticeshipNH’s most recent federal grant, will help with the administrative burden of tracking apprentices’ skill development and program hours.⁶ 

Additional monitoring and evaluation responsibilities are not even the biggest challenge to emerge from ApprenticeshipNH’s success, however. Each new federal grant brings a new enrollment target and CCSNH’s staff, as for other community colleges who have gotten into apprenticeship intermediary work, must ensure that program quality is not sacrificed for a larger head count. “Our numbers don’t reflect the amount of work we put into these systems,” says Banks. “The numbers keep me up at night, not the compliance.” 

Jackson and Banks were clear-eyed about two of the most important priorities for supporting ApprenticeshipNH’s success: regular funding and deeper connections with other state workforce development stakeholders. 

Apart from small charitable grants that help connect some apprentices to social services, ApprenticeshipNH is entirely funded by federal dollars. As in other communities where federal grants have helped stand up innovative apprenticeship intermediaries, the looming question is who will step in to fund these critical intermediary functions in the longer term. States play a critical role in funding successful apprenticeship systems, and some intermediaries support their operations with fees-for-service charged to participating employers.⁷ As it stands, ApprenticeshipNH faces an uncertain outlook in terms of new, more sustainable funding streams. But even though its staff members are not in a position to advocate for legislative updates, they have continued working to shore up ApprenticeshipNH’s intermediary processes and deepen its statewide connections to show the value of their work.

ApprenticeshipNH plans to use its most recent federal grant—$5.8 million awarded in June under the Apprenticeships Building America (ABA) grant program—to establish a stronger statewide infrastructure that can deliver consistent support for apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships, and high school apprenticeship model.⁸ That means new shared branding as well as more centralized processes for grant administration. Further relationship building will be another key part of the ABA strategy. Although CCSNH’s intermediary role provides key competencies in program design, student recruitment, and strategic oversight, workforce boards have the ear of employers in a way that individual CCSNH colleges may not. And tighter connections with the state education and labor departments can help to harmonize apprenticeship offerings across the state, Banks and Jackson hope, while avoiding conflicting messaging.  

Despite its early success, ApprenticeshipNH is still a work in progress. This is perhaps the most important lesson from ApprenticeshipNH’s experience: that community colleges and systems can excel as apprenticeship intermediaries, but that it will take time, investment, and lots of behind-the-scenes work. Banks and Jackson encourage aspiring community college intermediaries to conduct an inventory of existing work-based learning programs in their state or region. Teams working as intermediaries should connect prospective apprentice employers with relevant faculty as soon as possible: “That way the employer knows those classes, and they’ll be there whether ApprenticeshipNH is here or not,” says Banks.

Above all, the team should avoid biting off more than it can chew. “We can’t be everything to everybody, even though we want to,” Banks says. Navigating this role and knowing when to stop “biting” is sometimes easier said than done, particularly in fields that aren’t considered traditional in the apprenticeship sector, such as IT and cybersecurity.