For sports fans, March is a time for brackets and buckets, for nail-biters and buzzer beaters. Millions of Americans compete to plot the smoothest path from conference finals to the Final Four in the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments, hoping they’ve picked winners and spotted the biggest barriers standing in the way of their teams’ success. This year, for fans of apprenticeship, many of these same elements are now in play, thanks to new guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). Designed to accelerate program registration and reduce administrative friction, the guidance seeks to create a clearer, more efficient path to registration by addressing long-standing implementation challenges that critics contend have constrained growth and limited employer uptake. Not every change will carry equal weight, and important questions remain about how these policies will play out in practice. Still, taken together, they reflect a clear and laudable push toward modernization. There are some lay-ups, some controversial calls, and even a literal shot clock.  Below, we break down the guidance, examining where these changes could meaningfully change the game and what they might signal for the future of the field.

Redrawing the Training Playbook

Successful teams don’t run the same play every possession;  they read the defense, adjust on the fly, and design plays that suit the strengths of their roster. Similarly, the Registered Apprenticeship (RA) regulations offer flexibility to design training for apprentices to suit differences in employer needs, occupational requirements, training approaches, and apprentice skill-sets, but DOL imposed administrative policies in 2016 that narrowed this flexibility. DOL’s new guidance strips away those restrictions and returns to the actual RA regulations.

The regulations provide for three varieties of RAs: time-based, which require apprentices to complete a fixed number of hours of on-the-job learning (OJL), which must be at least 2,000 hours; competency-based, in which apprentices advance as they master skills, regardless of the time spent in OJL; and hybrid, which combines the two approaches, requiring apprentices to complete a range of OJL hours and to demonstrate skills mastery to progress. (The Urban Institute has a helpful explainer on the pros and cons of each approach.) In 2016, DOL announced that no matter how quickly someone in a competency-based apprenticeship demonstrates they have acquired occupational skills, they must still complete 12 months of OJL, potentially delaying high-performers from obtaining their journeyworker certificate and earning the higher wages that go along with it. 

To promote quality assurance, apprentice safety, and consistency across employers, DOL consults with industry to identify the duration of the on-the-job learning needed to learn an occupation through a time-based or hybrid apprenticeship. The 2016 guidance only permitted sponsors to adjust the DOL-identified number of hours by 25 percent (upward or downward, but not both). But what is an industry standard one day may change with advances in technology or regulatory shifts, and innovations in training may shorten the learning curve.

Because every apprentice brings a unique skill set to the job, the RA regulations permit sponsors to grant advanced standing when someone has prior experience or demonstrates skills mastery, so long as the sponsor uses objective criteria that are applied uniformly for all apprentices. This practice is a popular strategy for ensuring pre-apprenticeship programs give workers a head start on registered apprenticeship, for example. The 2016 guidance, however, limited advanced standing to 50 percent of training and added minimum time requirements: competency-based apprentices had to work under a sponsor for at least six months, and others at least 1,000 hours, before they could receive their journeyworker certificate of completion. Here again, apprentices who start with considerable skills and high-performers who learn quickly lose out. 

The latest guidance removes these constraints, reopening the full playbook and allowing sponsors to adapt their strategy to the game in front of them.  With that freedom comes a need for strong refereeing. DOL must ensure that it has sufficient well-trained staff to monitor for potential abuses of the flexibility afforded by the regulations. For example, with some states and now DOL offering financial incentives to employers who launch apprenticeships, it will be important for DOL staff to look carefully at how and the extent to which sponsors are granting advanced standing to prevent an unscrupulous employer from dressing up standard incumbent worker training as a faux apprenticeship to scoop up that cash. 

Handing the Ball Back to State Apprenticeship Agencies

New guidance from DOL clarifies a long-blurred line of authority in State Apprenticeship Agency (SAA) states. The department asserts that core regulatory responsibilities, such as approving new occupations and programs, conducting compliance reviews, and deregistering programs, must rest with the SAA and cannot be delegated to State Apprenticeship Councils (SACs). Realistically, this guidance applies to fewer than a dozen states that currently look to SACs to perform these duties. That said,  DOL notes that many of these states have earned a reputation for very slow, tedious approval processes and, at times, seemingly arbitrary decision-making, especially when it comes to non-traditional occupations and programs. (And there’s some data to back up the stories, too.) By restoring decision-making authority to the SAAs in these states, DOL hopes to simplify and expedite registration for sponsors and, ultimately, increase the number of programs and apprentices.

Streamlining the registration process and making state approaches more consistent across our partially federated system of apprenticeship is a worthy goal. Despite this, the odds are not in DOL’s favor here. Where SACs have approval responsibilities, they wield considerable influence, and they’re unlikely to hand the ball over without a fight. For one thing, some of these states, like Washington, have enshrined the SAC’s program approval duties in law. Stripping them of these responsibilities could require new state legislation, which will move slowly and face resistance from politically powerful labor unions, whose members are well-represented on most SACs. 

If SAAs and SACs don’t comply with the new guidance, DOL has two enforcement mechanisms at their disposal. They can step in to directly approve apprenticeship programs through the Office of Apprenticeship, essentially undercutting the SACs’ authority. They can also move to derecognize a State Apprenticeship Agency for non-compliance with federal regulation, an exceedingly rare step. Both of these have been used rarely in the past, and it’s unclear how serious the department is about activating them this time around. Derecognition in particular seems improbable, given recent history and the potential costs (both financial and political) of the protracted legal fight that an attempt to do so would trigger. 

It seems unlikely we’ll see SAAs regain approval authority that has been delegated to SACs in short order. One other aspect of this guidance could come into play more quickly: the reminder that SACs should include ‘’representation of those industries or occupations that might be characterized as new or emerging’’ to reflect the composition of the apprenticeship system as a whole. While there has been resistance to doing so voluntarily in some places, it would be much easier for states to adjust SAC composition than to legislate (or litigate) statutory responsibilities. Nominating a few new faces to a SAC may be an easy way to signal an intent to comply with this new guidance, without tackling the rest of it in earnest. And, importantly, this guidance is directed to SACs in all 32 SAA states, not just councils with approval duties.

Sure, it’d be a small tweak to the lineup, but strong role players can make all the difference. It could still meaningfully change the game. 

Checking the Score on Completion

Completion rate data became required as part of the accountability framework established in guidance nearly two decades ago. The Department of Labor used these rates to target technical assistance to lower-performing grantees, but did not publish them publicly in an accessible, comparable way. The agency’s new guidance creates a data portal on Apprenticeship.gov to compile state and industry completion and cancellation rates. This will increase transparency and comparability, allowing researchers to more easily study challenges and successes in apprenticeship and for policymakers, practitioners, and industry leaders to learn from counterparts in other states and industries. 

With any data, context matters. While this is a long-overdue step towards transparency in the apprenticeship system, completion rates and cancellation rates are not the only two indicators of program quality. Other components, such as wages, mentorship, opportunities for upward mobility, job quality, and employer involvement, are important to include when assessing quality. The portal will not include data on any of these factors. Likewise, the racial, gender, and disability diversity of program participants matters, and the completion and cancellation rates in the portal will not be disaggregated by race, gender, or other demographic indicators, information that is important to help identify and address barriers women, workers of color, workers with disabilities, and other subgroups underrepresented in the current system face in traditional apprentice roles. 

We welcome more accessible and transparent data for the system, with these nuances in mind, remembering that completion and cancellation rates may show the final score, but can’t explain everything that happened during the game. 

Betting on Buzzer Beaters

Basketball fans, good news: We’ve arrived at the shot clock portion of our analysis. In the new guidance, DOL commits to improved timeliness for and transparency about program registration determinations. The department is self-imposing a 30-day review window for registration approvals, beginning from when the sponsor submits standards to DOL. It has also launched a new webpage—i.e., the shot clock—that shows the number of apprenticeships DOL’s Office of Apprenticeship (OA) has approved in the previous month and the average number of days from standards submission to approval. 

These commitments will be most meaningful to programs/sponsors in Office of Apprenticeship states, though the exact impact remains to be seen. For example, the department hasn’t shared data about OA’s current approval timelines, so we can’t definitively say the 30-day commitment will be an improvement on the status quo, though that is possible. That said, this commitment is welcome from a customer service perspective alone. By publicly establishing a standard, programs have a clearer understanding of what to expect from DOL and when. DOL also pledged to provide written explanations in cases when the determination will take more than 30 days—a move that would ensure waiting programs don’t feel left in the dark if their approval is taking longer than standard. 

The 30-day review window doesn’t directly impact SAAs or programs in SAA states directly. SAAs don’t have to do anything differently as a result of this bulletin. But it might incentivize SAA states, regardless of whether they have a State Apprenticeship Council, to make their own commitments to improved approval timelines, customer service, and/or transparency—especially if the shot clock shows OA is outpacing them. (For more on how SACs impact timeliness, see the Handing the Ball Back to State Apprenticeship Agencies section above.) This could be healthy competition, so long as neither OA nor SAAs sacrifice program quality in the name of speedier determinations. 

DOL’s efforts to address two common complaints about the registration process are commendable. But it’s worth noting that these are self-imposed standards, and there’s no external mechanism to hold the department accountable for achieving these benchmarks. OA’s ability to make good on its stated goals of greater efficiency and transparency will depend on how well it can implement and execute on these commitments. 

The Path to Victory Is Paved with Small Moves

Aiming to hustle more apprenticeship programs off the bench and onto the court, DOL’s guidance is a noteworthy effort to expand the field in pursuit of President Trump’s 1 million apprentice goal. None of these changes will transform the system overnight, but they are practical adjustments that could make it easier for more programs to get into the game and to track growth and quality over time. Sometimes the path to victory is not a dramatic play, but small moves in the right direction.