American Apprenticeships are Red, White, Blue… and Maybe Orange

Blog post by Commerce Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews and Deputy Secretary of Labor Chris Lu

Name a European country that is among our top trading partners and whose multinationals employ more than 400,000 workers in the United States. Their highly skilled workforce extracts and processes the petroleum that fuels our cars.  They manufacture the ice cream and beer that fuel our summers and the semiconductors that are the brains in our smartphones. They provide banking services and investment advice, conduct cutting edge research to increase crop yield and quality globally, and produce leading business analytics and information.  They design and manufacture specialty plastics, performance coatings for airplanes, and our daily vitamins.

The answer is the Netherlands, which has invested $280 billion in the United States.

We were pleased to host 10 leading Dutch investors at the Department of Commerce last week to learn more about their U.S. operations and discuss their workforce challenges. We also were honored to be joined by Ambassador to the United States Henne Schuwer, and René van Hell, director for international business at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

During the meeting, we took the opportunity to discuss U.S. registered apprenticeships with the firms.  

The Netherlands has a long tradition of apprenticeships, with its roots in the guild system and a more formal structure developing since World War II, but many Dutch companies are unfamiliar with how to grow their apprenticeship programs in the United States. The business leaders we met with expressed a desire to work with the Department of Labor to examine how their own companies might create new apprenticeship programs.  In both our countries, apprenticeships work. In the U.S., over 90 percent of apprenticeship completers are employed, and earn over $60,000 annually. 

In 2014, President Obama set an ambitious goal to double the number of registered apprenticeships and adapt this model for the 21^st century. Since then, the United States has increased the number of apprentices by nearly 30 percent, to about 491,000 active apprentices nationwide. Recently, the Labor Department announced the availability of a historic $90 million ApprenticeshipUSA investment that is already helping expand the nation’s talent for jobs in demand.

Registered apprenticeships are no longer just a training model – they are a movement, backed by the technical support of Departments of Labor and the partnership of the Department of Commerce. More importantly, this movement is backed by the commitment of businesses across the United States, like the Dutch multinationals we met with. 

Foreign investors in the United States are establishing roots in the local U.S. communities where they operate. Although the companies we met with spanned many sectors, they acknowledged that often they are competing in the same talent pool and even potentially for the same candidates. By building partnerships around training, these same businesses can broaden and build our nation’s talent pool through apprenticeships. Doing so involves working with their local community colleges, high schools, career and vocational schools, and even middle schools, which many companies already are doing. It also can involve working together to build apprenticeships or participate in joint outreach — like National Manufacturing Day. 

We stand ready to work with these Dutch companies and other multinationals from across the globe as they increase their investments in our country, communities and workers.