According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor shortages are here to stay. Boomers are retiring, more people are sitting on the sidelines of the labor market, and big economic shifts in the wake of the pandemic mean that the workforce doesn’t always have the skills employers need. With 50% more jobs than job seekers, many experts predict that even in a recession, companies will still be scrambling for talent.
For employers struggling to find the talent they need, the solution may be hiding in plain sight: current employees. I believe intense competition for skilled workers and high rates of front-line turnover aren’t two distinct problems but a single one with a common solution.
According to a recent analysis by the Burning Glass Institute and Multiverse, some 36 million Americans are currently employed in high-churn, low-wage roles. Often overlooked as “unskilled” or “low skilled,” these workers are paid in the bottom third of all U.S. jobs. With little incentive to stay, low-wage workers churn from job to job, with a median tenure of just 18 months.
These 36 million Americans represent an untapped reservoir of talent, with skills and experience built in the real-world workplace. Those working in front-line jobs are like stem cells, with many of the capabilities needed for higher-value work if they were just given the opportunity. With the right training, these workers could take on a wide range of in-demand roles.
Take for example the many high-growth fields where employers struggle to fill roles, including computer systems analysts, project management specialists, and software developers. Jobs like these are filled based on skills, not degrees. That makes them well suited to on-the-job training that builds on existing capabilities—in short, a new generation of apprenticeships for the knowledge economy.
The idea of taking workers toiling in low-wage jobs and turning them into coveted software developers may sound like modern-day alchemy—the Cinderella story of our time. But there’s no magic to it. I would argue that apprenticeships are a singularly powerful mechanism for building skills step by step.
Investing in those working in high-churn jobs may seem counterintuitive. But in a tight market, companies need to rethink their value proposition to prospective employees. Enabling workers to springboard into new roles is key to becoming an employer of choice.
Companies are starting to embrace this idea. McDonald’s brands itself as a gateway to better work: “America’s Best First Job.” Retailers like Gap have built a similar narrative—that their entry-level jobs offer an opportunity for workers to build skills that will serve them throughout their careers.
But apprenticeship, a newer approach for many of these employers, is a uniquely valuable tool for supporting skill development and expanding opportunity. That’s important, because in the kinds of jobs most ripe for apprenticeship success is determined by proficiency in a specific set of capabilities.
As with traditional apprenticeships in fields like plumbing or carpentry, a network administration apprentice would progressively acquire and exercise first basic skills like server administration and network troubleshooting and then skills like Linux and systems administration that boost wages and mobility. Over time, workers can grow from entry-level network support technicians to network administrators and then network architects.
This new model of apprenticeship isn’t just a critical new avenue for broadening the talent base. It’s also an important tool for diversifying talent pipelines. Individuals from low-income backgrounds and communities of color—who tend to be underrepresented among college graduates—are often overrepresented in lower-wage fields with few viable pathways to quality jobs and careers. By pulling employees up from within, employers can move out of the zero-sum game of wrestling one another for diverse candidates and actually grow the pie.
Consider Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. Seeking new strategies to at once expand its tech workforce and meet its diversity goals, Yum turned its focus inward, building an apprenticeship program to help its front-line workers step up into the company’s rapidly growing slate of tech roles. The result is an initiative that the organization says is solving a key talent shortage while also enabling the company to make progress toward its equity mandates.
Employees, meanwhile, are often more than happy to upskill. In economic downturns, people may stick it out in low-wage roles, glad to be employed at all. But that isn’t true in our current economy, where open roles outpace the number of job seekers. Even with looming recession fears, twice as many people are quitting their roles as are being laid off.
Today’s tight labor market is forcing employers to question long-held assumptions, like which roles really require an academic degree. Recognizing the potential of front-line talent should be another such rethink. Apprenticeship can be a powerful mechanism for unlocking that potential and for bridging the gap between workers yearning for opportunity and businesses starving for talent.
