Chicago’s Strategies for Apprenticeship Expansion

Over two-thirds of all Illinois residents live in Chicago’s metropolitan area. The third largest city in the United States and also the third most economically productive, the Windy City benefits from unrivalled industry diversity.¹ Like any other city, however, Chicago faces the policy challenge of supporting well-paid employment opportunities for its residents. In spite of its economic dynamism, and although its population has grown slowly over the past decade, roughly half of Chicago’s neighborhoods have youth unemployment rates of 20 percent or higher.²

Since the Great Recession, Chicago’s city government and Illinois’s state government have experimented with dozens of different strategies to support employment. Not all have had the desired impact. A 2015 analysis by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute (ILEPI) found that only four out of 24 different policy strategies studied directly supported employment: increased bachelor’s degree attainment, better access to early childhood education and care, reduced commuting times, and improvements to transit infrastructure such as highways and bridges.³ In a more recent report, the same authors found evidence in favor of another policy strategy: increased investment in apprenticeship pathways.⁴

Because they are regular, paid employees from the start, apprentices can see the labor market value of their skills from day one. By learning on the job and taking technical coursework directly related to their work, which is usually provided at low or no cost, apprentices reap the employment and earnings benefits of higher education with less cost than traditional college. “Apprenticeship programs create pathways into middle-class careers for young adults who are unable or unwilling to go to college,” wrote ILEPI’s researchers in the 2020 report. Many successful apprentices, indeed, will enjoy higher lifetime returns from their educational programs than will associate degree and even some bachelor’s degree graduates. To depict apprenticeship merely as an “alternative” to college, however, is an incomplete rendering.

Apprenticeship works as an end in itself—especially in traditional apprenticeship occupations in the building trades, as ILEPI’s authors describe—but can also serve as a bridge to further education, in some cases integrating completely with college degree programs.⁵ These nontraditional, college-connected apprenticeships, which use college coursework for their related technical instruction, provide a work-based pathway into well-paid careers in a number of professional fields that have historically required strictly academic training. The evolution of apprenticeship programs and the variety of their possible uses in municipal economic development strategies are nowhere as evident as in Chicagoland.⁶

The governments of the City of Chicago and Cook County have worked for decades to build policies and systems that incentivize apprenticeship training and equitable hiring in public and private development projects. Organized labor, commercial developers, and contractors, as well as the steadfast efforts of dozens of community-based organizations, all play important roles in Chicago’s construction apprenticeship system. By sustaining traditional, non-college apprenticeships in the building trades, the city continues to address the underrepresentation of racial minorities in well-paid construction jobs. But more recently, Chicago has also led the way in the development of college-connected programs across a range of nontraditional apprenticeship occupations. Driven by the City Colleges of Chicago, a network of experienced workforce development advocates, and some of Chicago’s largest white-collar employers, these innovative college-connected apprenticeships in business services, information technology, and healthcare support employment and college attainment at the same time.

Chicago’s apprenticeship strategy is still evolving, but for municipal leaders looking to couple economic development with equitable workforce development, the city’s support for traditional construction programs as well as nontraditional, college-connected apprenticeship pathways provides an instructive example.

Chicago’s building trades communities have historically struggled to recruit women and racial minorities and have worked for decades to improve the diversity of apprentices entering the sector. “Our issue isn’t necessarily expansion,” says Marc Poulos, executive director of the Indiana, Illinois, Iowa Foundation for Fair Contracting, a regional labor-management organization that advocates for contractors and workers on public projects. “We’re just looking to make our workforce of the future look more like the population in Chicago and the state of Illinois.”

Union apprenticeship spots are fiercely competitive: each year, Poulos says, one union representing operating engineers in northern Illinois and Indiana receives about 5,000 applications for 400 to 500 apprenticeship slots. For women and people of color, especially those who grew up in the inner city, the odds are even longer. Without a family history in the building trades, he says, these learners are less likely to hear about construction apprenticeships, and may lack foundational skills possessed by those who grew up in the suburbs or exurbs, with fenceposts to dig and small engines in the garage to fix. Female apprentices face an industry still rife with sexist attitudes that can make construction workplaces uncomfortable at best and unsafe at worst.

Successive generations of Chicago’s city leadership have worked to address the underrepresentation of women and minorities in construction using municipal policies related to contracting and bid preferences. In addition to requirements to hire local residents, city ordinances provide incentives for contractors to hire eligible construction apprentices in union- or college-connected apprenticeship programs, and establish a preferential system of “bid credits” that incentivize them to employ larger numbers of female or minority journeyworkers, apprentices, and laborers on public projects.⁷ These policies specify damages for contractors who do not live up to their local hiring requirements and diversity commitments, and have been recently expanded at the city level for private sector contracting projects⁸ and at the state level under the Illinois Tollway’s Earned Credit Program.⁹

For any of these procurement policies to have their intended effect, however, contractors need partners with the expertise and facilities to help train underrepresented workers. Numerous regional organizations contribute to this effort, constantly fundraising from a range of federal, state, and philanthropic sources. Chicago Women in Trades provides pre-apprenticeships for about 100 female job seekers in the construction sector every year, as well as advanced training in welding and construction. Other organizations, such as St. Paul’s Community Development Ministries and Revolution Workshop, provide similar construction pre-apprenticeships aimed at engaging young people of color in marginalized neighborhoods. In both cases, the pre-apprenticeships are designed to make candidates more competitive for the limited number of apprenticeship slots open each year.

A new initiative in Chicago also addresses the challenges that face construction apprentices once they make it into a program. Launched in 2019, HIRE360 works to improve program completion rates for underrepresented construction apprentices.¹⁰ “In the construction industry, it’s very hard to keep steady work,” explains Meghann Moses, a consultant who supports HIRE360 through the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance. “A big challenge we have found in building trades apprenticeship is in finishing the program,” she says. Apprentices can be left hanging between contracts, struggling to complete their required on-the-job training hours. Combined with other structural barriers, this leads to program completion rates among non-white apprentices that are about half those for white apprentices, according to HIRE360’s executive director, Jay Rowell. HIRE360 helps by matching apprentices looking for work with contractors working to fulfill their diversity commitments, and uses its growing cadre of case managers to support job seekers with career counseling, further skills training, and small grants for tools or transportation to a job site.

Chicago has made small but important strides in diversifying construction apprenticeships by setting a high bar for diversity and inclusion, and by cultivating a network of training organizations to help realize it.¹¹ But an inclusive economy can’t be built on the building trades alone. “The trades are a high-barrier position, and if we talk to 100 people, there may be only 10 who are interested in the opportunity,” says Rowell. “As an organization, we’re not going to be around very long if we don’t have opportunities for the other 90 people we talk to.”

For many well-paid white-collar jobs, there are few training alternatives to college. But the costs and time commitments of traditional academic programs can make them impractical for many working learners. What’s more, even some entry-level white-collar jobs require skills beyond what college students learn in class. So alongside other college access and completion initiatives, Chicago’s business and higher education leaders have increasingly used college-connected apprenticeships to deliver more affordable and career-relevant higher education.

Illinois is home to a number of innovators in college-connected apprenticeships, including Harper College, located in the northwestern Cook County suburb of Palatine, and Illinois Central College in Peoria. Both of these institutions offer degree apprenticeships: college-connected apprenticeships that culminate in associate degrees.¹² The City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) and their employer partners have also led the way in degree apprenticeships over the past five years, but the defining characteristic of Chicago’s emerging strategy of nontraditional apprenticeship expansion is the variety of college-connected work-based learning programs it offers, including but not limited to the Registered Apprenticeship model.¹³

Three firms have played an outsized role in the expansion of apprenticeship into traditional white-collar occupations: Aon, Accenture, and Zurich Insurance Group. Beginning in 2016, these three multinational professional services and insurance firms began working with CCC and Harper College to develop degree apprenticeships in finance, human resources, and information technology. This employer-driven partnership, the Chicago Apprentice Network (CAN), now counts 29 businesses as members, and continues to educate employers about the value and best practices of apprenticeship. “It’s win for the city, since they’re getting new jobs for City Colleges’ talent pool,” says Daniel Serota, manager of public affairs at Aon and the company’s apprenticeship lead, “and it’s a great thing for us as employers.”¹⁴

In 2019, CAN’s successes and growing national interest in apprenticeship led to the creation of Apprenticeship 2020, a nonprofit initiative to drive nontraditional apprenticeship growth in Chicago. Leveraging a combined $3.2 million in investments from eight different philanthropic funders, Apprenticeship 2020 contributed $1.25 million to the creation of CCC’s Office of Apprenticeship & Workforce Solutions, a new office to coordinate its work-based learning activities.

The CCC system is massive, comprised of seven campuses spread across Chicago that each serve as a “Center of Excellence” in one or more fields. CCC’s day-to-day work of meeting the educational needs of nearly 80,000 students is even more complex when combined with work-based learning models. Terri Zhu of the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, which oversees federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding for all of Cook County, says that although the mission of CCC and the rest of Chicago’s workforce system is to put job seekers into high-quality jobs with advancement potential, “apprenticeship is fundamentally an answer to unmet employer demand.” CCC’s new office helps in this balancing act, serving as an intermediary to engage businesses in honest conversation about skills needs while maintaining focus on the interests of students.

In some cases, the outcome of skills conversations between CCC and its employer partners isn’t Registered Apprenticeship, at least not right away. Aon and other large employers champion Registered Apprenticeship for its quality guidelines and easy replicability—a clear advantage for firms with offices across the country. But to spread work-based learning models among other employers hiring for nontraditional occupations, CCC has found it has to be flexible. A new pilot partnership with the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce will place CCC students in apprenticeships with one of a dozen small- to medium-sized firms. Though the programs don’t have to be registered, students work part-time and receive salary, benefits, and a tuition stipend.¹⁵ Programs under Career Launch Chicago, a CCC youth apprenticeship partnership with Chicago Public Schools, also don’t have to be registered immediately, though many soon will be.¹⁶ And another CCC initiative, the Medical Assisting Program at Malcolm X College, looks a lot like an apprenticeship, but the program’s specialized accreditor isn’t yet on board with the apprenticeship model. Still, the program’s trainees receive paid on-the-job training, customized classroom instruction, and a standards-based education leading to a credential that lets them start a healthcare career.

Although Registered Apprenticeship is the keystone of Chicago’s college-connected apprenticeship strategy, the City Colleges of Chicago’s support for an eclectic array of work-based learning models has allowed the system to draw in new employer partners while preserving its focus on the needs and outcomes of individual students.

Chicago doesn’t have a single, unifying apprenticeship strategy—it has several. “There isn’t a state apprenticeship agency, so there’s always a question of who owns what,” says Angela Morrison, a policy associate at the Chicago Jobs Council. “Apprenticeship work here is very relational.” Built on close networks among a wide array of public, nonprofit, and private stakeholders, a strong tradition of organized labor, and CCC’s flexibility with regards to experimentation in work-based learning, this multifaceted approach has made important contributions to apprenticeship awareness and uptake among businesses and learners.

The state’s Apprenticeship Illinois Framework, its federally-funded intermediary and navigator grants, and recent legislation focused on apprenticeship diversity and outcomes data all serve to reinforce the foundation for Chicago’s future apprenticeship efforts.¹⁷ Both the Illinois Workforce Innovation Board’s Apprenticeship Committee and the Illinois Apprenticeship Collaborative, led by Young Invincibles, provide helpful vehicles for further policy advocacy around program design and sustainable funding. But the continued expansion of Chicago’s traditional and nontraditional apprenticeship opportunities still faces near-term policy challenges, recalling three other policy highlights of ILEPI’s 2015 report: commuting times, child care, and a balanced state budget.

Even with its well-regarded public transit system, Chicago’s sprawling geography can make it difficult for apprentices to arrive on time to construction job sites, or to the right CCC Center of Excellence, especially without a car or when child care is a factor. Transportation and child care supports from organizations like HIRE360 and One Million Degrees (OMD), which serves learners in CCC’s nontraditional apprenticeships and work-based learning initiatives, will play a crucial part in the continuing success of apprenticeship as an economic inclusion strategy. “We’re not the employer, we’re not the institution. We’re an advocate, we're a liaison for students to help make sure they’re having fruitful conversations with their college and employer,” says Erika Ehmann, manager of workforce and corporate partnerships at OMD. The barrier-reduction efforts of these types of nonprofits and community-based organizations will remain instrumental in Chicago’s work of balancing the needs of learners and employers in apprenticeship.

With a tight regional labor market, a strong national economy, and some timely philanthropic contributions, Chicago’s workforce advocates have found it relatively easy to strike the delicate balance between the needs of employers and apprentices. It will be much more difficult if and when the next economic downturn strikes. As the state of Illinois continues to recover from its two-year budget impasse,¹⁸ it’s important that state and municipal lawmakers work to secure regular public funding for the institutions and organizations whose ongoing efforts will be necessary to make sure Chicago’s traditional and nontraditional apprenticeships are diverse, equitable, and widely available.

Though apprenticeship's effectiveness as a training model for well-paid construction occupations has earned it a reputation as "the other four-year degree," it isn't just a college alternative. In Chicago, an array of apprenticeship strategies support residents' economic success through college-connected as well as non-college pathways.

This brief discusses the efforts of workforce development stakeholders in Chicago to support equity and access in both traditional construction apprenticeships as well as programs training for "nontraditional," white-collar roles. Organizations that provide pre-apprenticeships and wraparound services increase the likelihood that apprentices will succeed in their programs. Procurement policies create incentives for contractors and developers who hire and train equitably—and consequences for those who don't.

Chicago doesn't have a single, unifying apprenticeship strategy—it has several. Its efforts to support diversity and success in traditional and nontraditional apprenticeship occupations provide a valuable case study for cities across the country working towards a more inclusive economy.

Thank you to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., especially Amy Wallace and Owen Washburn, for their generous support of the research and production of this brief.

Additionally, I would like to acknowledge the many experts and city leaders in the Chicago area who graciously contributed their insight and expertise during interviews. This brief also benefited from the support and insight of many of my colleagues at the Center on Education & Skills at New America, notably Mary Alice McCarthy and Lul Tesfai, as well as Meegan Dugan Bassett of New America Chicago. I especially thank Riker Pasterkiewicz, Julie Brosnan, Joe Wilkes, and Fabio Murgia for their support in the publishing process.