Addressing Workforce Needs Through Youth Apprenticeships

The Vail Valley Partnership (VVP) launched an apprenticeship program to support the workforce needs of local businesses and equip local youth with the skills and experiences needed to find sustainable jobs to keep them in the community.

From the beginning, VVP saw the importance of listening to a variety of community stakeholders using a thoughtful process. It also felt the urgent need to act. A rural resort community with a high cost of living, the valley was experiencing an outmigration of talent between the ages of 31-64, a key middle management demographic.

Working collaboratively with employers, workforce partners and community leaders, VVP launched its CareerWise Modern Youth Apprenticeship program as a key element of a comprehensive workforce development strategy developed to serve its unique rural setting. VVP serves as an intermediary, working with businesses, educators and students to create a program that addresses workforce needs and helps local students gain real-world skills and credentials that provide them with options to enter the workplace in a high-paying job or continue their education.

VVP started out by excluding industries that already had apprenticeship programs. “We wanted to stay away from those and not jump into something that already exists, so we started building apprenticeship programs everywhere else,” said Erik Williams, VVP’s director of community development. “We’ve been very intentional in saying that an apprenticeship program is not for trades, it’s for absolutely everything.”

The regional business community has bought into this mantra. From small local nonprofits to the Valley’s largest employers, VVP has worked with business owners and HR leaders to change the thinking about apprenticeships and broaden the list of jobs open to apprenticeship opportunities. That buy-in has only grown. The youth program recently had its strongest year ever, offering close to 45 jobs. Business recruitment flipped dramatically. In past years, the program had about 70 percent renewals. This cycle, roughly 70 percent of participating businesses were new.

Williams said that the key to launching a program like this is to find one business and one school committed to making this work, then tell that story through your local media. After, scale the program using positive peer pressure. Other chambers seeking to create programs like this should look at their volunteer leadership and identify champions who can help grow the program.

Now in its ninth cohort with 40 new apprentices, VVP measures success in a number of ways, including tracking qualified applicants, apprenticeship placements, apprenticeship salary ranges and the number of apprentices hired. Williams said the most important thing to VVP is whether its programs meet the needs of member businesses. Building on the foundation of the youth program, VVP has launched a new initiative called Career Plus to bridge students into formal Registered Apprenticeship Programs.

“It’s not just numbers. Numbers are great, but I try to stay away from making that our metric of success. The idea is, are the businesses being served? The biggest metric of success is that every business that has worked with us has signed up to do it again.”