Conclusion

In Switzerland, Germany, and Singapore, many workers obtain career preparation through rigorous employer-provided training programs like apprenticeship. Although a far smaller proportion of Americans train for new jobs through apprenticeship, U.S. employers do invest in training that is vitally important to workers’ job performance and economic mobility. The 2021 Employer Training Survey provided insights into the scale, motivations, and program characteristics of employer-provided training.

ETS respondents almost universally described their training provision as motivated by the need to “get the right skills.” But although employers recoup the productivity benefits of highly customized training, workers may find that these specific skills are not as valued elsewhere in the job market. ETS questions relating to training programs’ credentialing and quality assurance highlight the importance of monitoring program performance and embedding portable credentials and college credit in training. Policymakers and participating businesses should be especially attentive to these characteristics when socioeconomic inequities are at play, as they invariably are.

The tension between employers’ interests and workers’ interests in employer-provided training is also visible in ETS respondents’ appraisals of different training models. Apprenticeship programs were well represented among survey responses, owing to the survey’s dissemination method and high response rates in states like Wisconsin, with large apprenticeship systems. For workers and businesses alike, there is a lot to love about the longer, more rigorous apprenticeship model. ETS results suggest that less formal employer-provided training models, such as internships and professional development, may be more vulnerable to the type of disruptions that occurred at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though longer, more rigorous employer-provided training programs are more complicated to develop, and still vulnerable to pandemic disruptions, they are likely to confer greater educational benefits to learners and to be more robust in the face of future crises.

Businesses will not provide their employees with training unless they are convinced that they will receive a return on investment. At the same time, the experience of the pandemic and ensuing labor shortages have allowed workers to demand more from their employers. As the American labor market continues to recover and realign from the shock of the pandemic, findings from the inaugural ETS can inform state and local policymakers working to better integrate businesses into workforce and economic development projects that serve employers and workers alike.