 As we get our final session together here to close things out, I do want to touch on one theme that the Mayor brought up that aligns so well with what we're about to explore with our final panel. And it's this question of how you demonstrate value for these pathways. And when we talk about apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship, sometimes the hardest part about it is that we know it has to be industry led. We know we can't have more apprentices without more employers that are willing to hire them. So for those of us who are in the public policy space, who are used to trying to find ways to catalyze that action, but it can be frustrating to feel like you've got to wait for industry to lead, what can you do? I thought the Mayor hit on a couple, two things. One, straight up convener in chief, creating the space for industry to lead. And I think that's something we saw on display here in the Charleston program. It's most certainly what we saw with CareerWise Colorado, which you're about to hear a little bit about. I'm going to invite the next panel to come up too as I share sort of the other piece of this. Which is that governors and mayors can create these spaces for industry to lead and for have a conversation with the various stakeholders. That's number one. But the other thing he said, too, can also be controversial in our field, which is, you know, what is the role of public investment? The whole value of apprenticeship is in large part derived from the fact that we are mobilizing employer investment into young people. And we don't want to substitute that. We don't want to take that away. When employers are invested in something, they're invested in its success. You heard that on the panel yesterday. So what is the right role for public investment? Where do you, how do you use it? And how do you, where do you use it? And so the Mayor said about investing a million dollars, that signals something. It singles value. And it says to the community, to the people he's trying to reach that, you know, this is a priority for the administration and budget signal priorities better than any speeches do. And so for the government willing to put money on the table, but to require and to ask to say industry, we're going to do our part. We're going to send a message to the young people throughout our city that we value these pathways. There's no better way to do that through investment. But at the same time, using that investment in a smart way that does not crowd out the value of the private investment, the industry led nature of apprenticeship. That's what makes it so unique. That's hard and that's a tension. I am very thankful that we have a panel here to explore that tension. So I'm going to introduce Ashley Carter. She's the Chief Operating Officer of CareerWise Colorado. If you have not heard of CareerWise Colorado yet, I'd be shocked. Many of you are probably here because you've heard of them. We are incredibly thankful that they're one of the other national partners in PIA. There are them and the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship Program, or rather what we would call practitioner place-based partners. But that's not really fair. They're national leaders. They're the ones that are doing the work. And so hearing from their perspective is powerful. But that's why we've called upon Ashley to lead this panel with a panel of esteemed folks who are looking at this also from the public sector side. How do we support, not crowd out, the value of more employer investment into youth apprenticeship? So these are interesting themes. We want questions to get ready. But first I want Ashley to talk a little bit about CareerWise and its vision and how it's looking to sort of mobilize resources for scale. So without further ado, Ashley. Thank you, Brent. And just so many thanks to the entire PIA team, to the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship Program, and to Trident Technical College for hosting us over the last two days and just creating a really learning packed agenda for us. We are so also fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn and observe from you all. And I'm just so thrilled to have the opportunity to close out these two days with a discussion on, you know, not only what it takes to start and launch a youth apprenticeship program. Thank you. Which is so very challenging in and of itself. But what does it then take to grow those programs into systems? What does it take to scale and sustain those programs? And the PIA team asked me to just take a couple of minutes before we jump in with our panelists to talk a little bit about how we've been thinking about that at CareerWise Colorado. Because the idea of designing for scale, designing for sustainability has really been baked into our DNA from the very beginning. So as Brent mentioned, CareerWise Colorado is working to create a statewide modern youth apprenticeship system in the state of Colorado. And importantly, we act as a non-profit intermediary in the system. So we are working to connect students with business, with K-12 partners, with higher education partners. Our only objective, our only mission as a non-profit organization is to do just that. And so far, in the last two and a half years since we launched officially as an organization, we have launched two cohorts of youth apprentices into the workplace. And we're in the thick of recruiting for our third cohort of youth apprentices right this very moment. And when they step foot into their apprenticeships in June of this coming year, we'll have somewhere along the lines of 400 youth apprentices working with over 120 different employers in six occupational pathways with 16 different school districts, 64 school partners, and 11 higher education partners. And I would say that the road to here over the last two and a half years has not been easy. It's been incredibly challenging. We've learned so much every single day. We've made mistakes along the way. And we're looking forward to hosting this group of people at a future convening so that we can share with you all what we've learned along the way. Because it has been so challenging to get here, but we're proud of the early signs of success that we're seeing. And I think that's in part because of one thing Mayor Woodfinn just said, which is that this works. This is a compelling experience for apprentices and employers. So we're so thankful that we get to be a part of something that truly works for our key partners. But I also think we've been able to achieve very early signs of scale because of the intermediary role that we're playing in this system. I know that's been mentioned several times over the last two days, but when thinking about designing for scale and sustainability, our personal belief is that having an intermediary in the system who's doing that heavy lifting, coordinating all of these players so that employer partners don't have to do that heavy lifting is so incredible to getting them to come to the table and then stay engaged at the table. But our ambition is not to operate at this level. Our ambition extends far beyond that. And our strategic plan calls for operating a statewide youth apprenticeship system over the next decade that would have about 20,000 students participating in any given year. That would be about 10% of the state's high school juniors and seniors. You probably can't see the numbers on here. They're not important, but basically what the last column says on here is that within a decade, if we were successful in achieving that 20,000 student number, we'd be working with about 3,000 employers, about 2% of the state's businesses, but 20% of the businesses that employ 20 or more apprentices. We'd be working in 60 school districts across 15 occupational pathways. And if we can get there and we're working so hard to do so, it would just be so very exciting for us because it would be a sign that we're really not just a program, but a true system, one that is integrated into the fabric of how we operate as a state. And we're seeing very early signs of that with our K-12 partners starting to align their curriculum with the competencies that are part of our apprenticeships. They're aligning their schedules to make apprenticeship possible. We have a few higher ed partners who are starting to do the same thing, aligning their curriculum to our apprenticeships. The state will be and has been an incredibly important partner in this work and in this ambition to achieve scale. We work with the state in a couple of different important ways right now. The state currently has done a lot to really rebrand what apprenticeships are and the types of doors they can open for young people. We work closely with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment who's providing technical assistance to employers and industry associations. They recently launched a work-based learning unit to do just that. We work closely with the Colorado Workforce Development Council that's building and sharing data sets around the changing future of jobs in Colorado and the competencies that will be needed to succeed in those jobs. And we're working with the departments of education and higher education who are providing technical assistance to their constituents and also promoting this idea of apprenticeships among them. But most importantly, and to reiterate a point Brent made just a moment ago, each of these agencies recognizes just how critical it is for industry to lead in this work, for industry to enable them to participate and not for this group to necessarily own the work, but to really allow industry to own it and lead it. And that's really what we believe will end up sustaining this work over the long term. And just to paint that picture before I close and turn it over to our panelists, one thing we're so excited about if we can really put employers in the lead and make sure we're designing a program, a system that meets their core talent development needs is that they will sustain this work over the long term. So the business partners who participate in Colorado pay the apprentice wages, they pay for the higher education coursework and they also pay career-wise a small fee to support the work that we provide in support of the broader system. And that's what's represented by the dark blue, the light blue and the orange lines on this slide. The blue is showing what employers will contribute over time in wages and training to this work. The orange, what they'll contribute to career-wise. And amazingly, the dark blue sliver at the top there is what philanthropy is making possible through this work. We could not exist today. We could not be building and doing early-scaling work without the generosity of our funders. But part of what excites us and those funders is that there's a real path to sustainability, a real path such that employers and the contributions they make to this system will far eclipse what philanthropy ultimately ends up injecting. So with that backdrop in mind as to how we're thinking about scale and systems integration in Colorado, I'd like to turn it over to our panelists and I will just introduce them briefly once I get seated here just a second. Is my mic working? Can you hear me? Great. Okay, so we have an incredible group of people here to comment on this theme of expanding apprenticeships and really growing the impact of the work we're all so excited about. So with us today we have Suzy Levine, who's the commissioner of the Washington State Employment Security Department. We have Brad Niece, who is the assistant vice president of economic development for the South Carolina Technical College System and who's the director of apprenticeship Carolina as well. We have Robert Esaro Angelo, who's the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development and we have Josh Arsé, who's the director of workforce development and the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. And Suzy, I'd love to start with you because in your former role as the ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein you had a real up close and unique view of a youth apprenticeship system that was really operating at scale and you've been an incredible advocate and voice in support of really building a youth apprenticeship movement here in the U.S. So I'm hoping you can first just start off by telling us a little bit more about what you saw in Switzerland that was so compelling and why you believe now is the right time to be talking about apprenticeships here in this country. Thanks for the question, Ashley. And you should know she's amazing. She's a total rock star in terms of what has been going on in Colorado and how we can learn from that in the United States. So I think what's useful is to understand actually, so I am not a long-term public sector employee. I actually worked at Microsoft and Expedia. I created a couple of nonprofit startups. So I've had a lot of other aspects of my career and in my role as ambassador one of the key things I focused on was foreign direct investment into the United States. So building jobs in the homeland. And Switzerland is the sixth largest foreign direct investor into the United States. Every one of your states has jobs generated by Swiss companies. I did not go there saying, gosh, let me learn about their apprenticeship system. I did go there thinking how do we get them to spend more money in the United States. And with that in mind, when I was visiting some of the biggest investors there, whether it was Nestle, whether it was ABB, whether it was a company called Bueller, I would see and ask them, so what can we do to get you to expand your footprint in the United States? And their number one comment was, we need more talent. They would put footprints into different states like ABB put a robotics facility in Michigan. They weren't asking for tax incentives. They wanted talent incentives. They wanted to know that talented individuals could help them build their products. So when my husband, Eric, who's here and I, we visited hundreds of companies and met with thousands of apprentices, saw what we saw, it was very clear that they were delivering a system that was providing folks with the ultimate source of 21st century skills and project-based learning, which certainly good buzzwords in the education system, but with a paycheck and with incredible dignity. And I would argue that what I saw and what we saw in Switzerland, they are producing the world's most future-ready workforce. And today, when we hear buzzwords like the future of work, we are not ready in our country overall right now. But Switzerland is, because they have figured out how to bridge the gap between the pace of innovation and the pace of education. And that's what we wanted to learn from there. The key to it is that business is invested, not just invited. It is not an afterthought after you've designed your whatever. Oh, you know what? Let's invite the Brad Neese Corporation. No, from the beginning it is, Brad, what are your needs? Let's talk about how we design this together. The businesses have co-opetition. They come together. Vigorous competitors work together to, within every five years, revamp the competencies and the curricula for whatever those jobs are that they need next, not just previously. And so, again, we saw that and we then saw the impact on what we were seeing on various governors. And earlier, those people who had the pleasure of hearing from my husband know that we had hosted there the governors from Delaware, Michigan, Texas, and then, of course, Colorado, where we saw the role of those containers bringing together business, philanthropy, academia and government to then motivate and move forward with systems here in the United States. So that's what I saw there, and most importantly, we're not going to be able to bring it back, lock, stock, and barrel, to here in the United States. We are a different nation. We have different structures. We have different conditions within and across the United States. But there are key aspects of it in terms of the role of business, in terms of the role from, you talked about programs to systems, and also in terms of the role of permeability where there are no dead ends. The best outcomes in Switzerland actually come from those who start as apprentices, go on to higher education, and then lead business and industry, and it ultimately leads to an overall unemployment rate right now of 2.7% overall, 2.4% for youth unemployment, something I think we all would envy. Absolutely. And along the lines of what you were just speaking to, how do you think we go from building programs to taking a more systems-oriented mentality in this country? And can you speak a little bit about how you're doing that in Washington State? Absolutely. Well, actually the person I think who has built the best model for different ways to approach this in the United States is actually sitting to my right. She's really built out this amazing way of looking at, and actually she was informed by work that was done by New America, of looking at whether you have a consolidated sort of single intermediary within a state or a primary intermediary within a state versus a distributed system. And while Colorado is doing this sort of primary intermediary model, Washington State is doing a more distributed model. Washington State already has a lot of programs on the ground, including the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee, of which we have a number of representatives here. Ajak, that's one of our top industries in Washington State. And we wanted to both recognize and honor those, plus we have a lot within labor. We have a very strong labor community in Washington State. How do you both federate those as well as diversify? And so our Career Connect Washington, which I encourage you to go to careerconnectwa.com and see the plan that we have up there, takes an approach of creating regional networks that we will empower and where they will be able to have a regional flavor. And we also have sectoral approaches as well. So healthcare, IT, and advanced manufacturing, those businesses within those areas are coming together to define what their collective needs are and to define some common pathways where we can develop that out. So again, I think that from a system standpoint, it is looking at what would be approachable for your respective state, what do you already have that's already existing and where do you need to start in that process? So Washington State, again, already had a lot on the ground that we needed to bring together, but to help people then have pathways that really are very braided multiple pathways. That's great. And Brad, I'd love to turn to you because you've in part lived some of that very experience that Suzy was just describing in the form of helping lead apprenticeship Carolina. And we've heard about apprenticeship Carolina over the course of the last two days, but I'm hoping you can put it in context for us and tell us a little bit more about the work that you all do, especially as it relates to the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship Program. Sure. First of all, you don't know this, but it's not fair to have to follow the ambassador in a conversation. Although I will tell you, my daughter gave me a world's number one dad shirt, so I feel like I can handle it. So first of all, thank you guys for coming to South Carolina. I hope you've had fun. I hope you've learned a lot and I hope you have spent money. Those are the things I hope that you have done while you're here. And if you've not spent money, feel free to do that before you leave. Apprenticeship Carolina, we have heard that smothered out throughout the couple of days here. And what we are, we're an organization statewide where housed at the South Carolina Technical College System. So in your state, you might call them community colleges here. We're real, we're dedicated and calling them technical colleges. And so we have a system office with a division of economic development. We also have that front-end recruitment organization like the AIDT. It's called ReadySC. I'm the Associate Vice President for our Division of Economic Development which oversees ReadySC and also Apprenticeship Carolina. And so Apprenticeship Carolina really has one mission. We have six consultants full-time that are out in our community throughout the state that do nothing but help our South Carolina businesses understand, develop, and ultimately, if they want to, register their apprenticeship programs. And we've done a pretty good job at this. Let me just, I don't have a bragging sheet, but I kind of know these statistics by now. When we started back in 2008, that was my first day. I was an apprenticeship consultant May 5th, 2008. We had 777 apprentices here in the state of South Carolina. We had a goal though that we wanted to reach 20,000 apprentices by 2020 and it seemed impossible. I will tell you that this month we have surpassed 30,000 apprentices. And so we're actually getting a shirt for that, right? So we're real proud about what we've done. We only had 90 companies when we started. We've helped over 1,000 companies register apprenticeship programs, everything from manufacturing to IT. You guys went to SNOP last night. They have an apprenticeship program. I will tell you, we're sort of new into this youth apprenticeship game, new in terms of how we've sort of been working with stuff. I think if you looked at our apprenticeship system as it were, we sort of began getting pushed into youth. I can tell you the guy's name. His name is Yordh Klesh. That's not a very typical South Carolina name. Yordh is from Germany. He's the CEO of a company called MTU, which is a Rolls-Royce company and very rural South Carolina in Aiken. Anybody been to Aiken? No. Okay. Yeah, a few of you. A few of you from South Carolina have been to Aiken. Well, anyway, and Eric, they must have a golf course there. But anyway, he had a very European approach to developing his workforce and he said, look, we need an apprenticeship program. Notice he didn't say we need a youth apprenticeship program because for him, youth is apprenticeships. And so he had a very uphill battle of developing our state's first youth apprenticeship program. I will tell you, he did not have a lot of friends to begin that process with. There was this guy who was his first detractor, a jerk, huge jerk, me. I was the first one that said, hey, look, we're not doing youth apprenticeship. Yordh, that's your thing over there. We do adults here. We're good with where we are. You come back when you have a different idea. Thankfully, we were wrong. We got invited to the White House. And then I will tell you, no one starts alone. The first person that Charleston called to come down to speak with the first companies in Charleston was NTU. Argenetta Galear came down, spoke with Ifa Ratorian. And so a spark sort of began down in the Charleston area. I will tell you, sitting in Charleston, it's awfully easy to get sucked into these guys because they are amazing. And Dr. Thornley is one of a kind. And so is Mitch and so is Melissa. But we are beginning to develop a more statewide approach to this whole youth apprenticeship thing. If you start going a little bit west, you'll run into Columbia, where our Midlands Tech folks that are sitting back there will tell you we also did a youth apprenticeship signing day a couple of weeks ago. We had great companies there. Sumter, which is probably not on a lot of your radar screen. Continental Tire, other companies are doing youth apprenticeship programs there. So we do have a really unique statewide perspective on what it takes to start this from the ground up and then build it to capacity. One of your slides that I found interesting, I think it said start slow, then build fast. We almost inverse that with apprenticeship Carolina. We said let's start fast and then slow it up a little bit. So we had this idea of grab them all, get as big as we can, get as big as we can quickly. And now we're moving more towards how can we go deeper into an apprentice's life and how can we go deeper into the roles that companies need us to play. Part of that is going into youth apprenticeship. And I'm wondering if you could elaborate on a point you made just a moment ago about operating at that state level. What do you see as the benefits of operating at that state level? First of all, one of the reasons that we're affiliated with the technical college system A, the technical college system was the one that spoke up and said we want to do this. Our state chamber of commerce was really the ones that was instrumental in creating our apprenticeship Carolina. So some of the things that we have though is we have this great multiplier effect at the state level. And so you would think from the conversations that we have that Mitch works for apprenticeship Carolina. I often say to Mitch, he's my best employee because I don't have to pay him, but he does it. And I will tell you that we work harmoniously in the local communities and so what we have is 16 different connecting points through our colleges who have local connections. We have a vision at the state and we're able to bring resources. We're able to have connections outside of the state that can help support us. But ultimately these become very local, very hands-on initiatives and you need folks like Mitch and Melissa at the ground level that can actually pull off the details. And so Josh, I'd like to turn to you because you are operating at that city level. And in your work you're responsible for overseeing an entire system to help connect job seekers with well-paying jobs through a range of programs. And I'm hoping you can speak a little bit to why apprenticeships are so central to what you see as being able to promote opportunity within San Francisco. Yeah, we're sorry, we're just joking that we must have got our seats wrong on the assignment. I'm happy to do so. No, my bad. Sorry, I'm still a pre-apprentice. Yeah, and I'm here with our team. You know, we've got Amabel Akvasada and Christie Speck with our TechSF apprenticeship program. And one of the things I'd like to talk about and I was talking with Brent from New America recently is the idea that apprenticeship is baked into the DNA of our workforce development system and that's kind of by design and happenstance as it were. And it's also really specific to youth, the way that our program came into existence and came to life. It's interesting because we have a new mayor. We work for Mayor London Breed. She just became mayor six months ago. Youth apprenticeship is critical to her mission that we leave no one behind in terms of a record boom in our city, an abundance of wealth and prosperity, record low unemployment, but very resilient and persistent gaps of opportunity, particularly around youth of color, folks who've had experiences with the justice system. So having a system in which apprenticeship is baked into the DNA to go back to that really means that for us as the Office of Economic Workforce Development, we started with the construction pre-apprenticeship program that is called CityBuild. It actually was brought into government, I was a civil rights attorney, then labor organizer brought into government by Mayor Ed Lee who passed away tragically in office to run this program, CityBuild. But CityBuild came to life in early 2004 when a previous mayor brought one particular labor leader out and had a conversation about initiatives for his new kind of envisioning of government for San Francisco and he specifically had a one-on-one, they had to kind of walk around the block kind of situation where this mayor-elect says, I really want to do something to put jobs on the table with youth and disadvantaged young people. There was kind of pockets of violence in the city. I want to put jobs on the table before we lose somebody to the streets and can we create a program that would accomplish that and then became CityBuild, a pre-apprenticeship program tied to the building trade apprenticeships. Interestingly enough, that bodes very well I think for people like our assistant labor secretary, John Dunn for apprenticeship because that mayor was named Gavin Newsom. He's now our governor of California, committing to 500,000 new apprenticeships for the state of California. But that experience and that kind of earn as you learn, trying to say that there are job seekers out there who can't afford to go to university. That's a big theme of all the sessions and the conversations here at the conference, which we're very grateful for, of course, to PAIA, is that you're going to lose a lot of opportunity if you don't create the pathway to earn while you learn. It's a luxury to go do the educational component. It's many times a luxury to go train or do an unpaid train in or survive. We have some of those offerings and folks do unemployment insurance and sleep on couches to make it. And so apprenticeship provided an opportunity to earn while we learn is key for us. Like I said, with Mayor Breed, she's a very inspirational figure. I just got to talk to Mayor Woodfin and said say hi to my buddy. She is our first African-American female mayor of San Francisco. She grew up in public housing. And she, in putting forth the initiative that we use to advance youth apprenticeship, the program's called Opportunities for All. And it's her vision that we talked about in the equity session that NABE led that the idea is that in youth programs and youth summer internships and such, we particularly found in San Francisco and Mayor Breed found that she was a local supervisor and county board of supervisors, she found that there was consistently high schools that didn't get outreach to or didn't get invited into the summer internship and might be because employers might have had biases about what made for a good intern or who was going to be successful or on the flip side of that who was safe for the employers. So what she intentionally did is she created this program, Opportunities for All that we implement with our Human Rights Commission, the director of whom wanted to be here but she had to stay back for a family emergency. But we intentionally go out in recruiting for this summer. We've gone to those high schools that didn't get recruited. We start in those neighborhoods and to flip the implicit bias with respect to the employers or some of the ways, or even recruiting the way we recruit youth to participate in a program like this, she tells her story. And if I can just tell this to her very briefly in a truncated fashion. Please. All right. It goes like this. She'll stand up in front of a group of youth. And these are young people who are grateful that the mayor's coming out to their high school because it's usually the well performing schools. It's not the schools where we go to where the achievement gap is most acute. The schools where we've got black and brown youth, single parent families, public housing families, families who've had experiences and are stuck in the cycle of the failures of the justice system. She will stand up there in front of the youth and say, you have access to a paid internship this summer. Whatever you want to do will help you do it. And if you don't see the potential and where it could go, she'll tell her story. She was 14 years old. She had somebody come into her high school and say that if you want to come, we can get you a paid internship. She said whatever. But she did it. And she will say that in a family where her brother is serving a long term sentence in prison and her sister died of a drug overdose. She is the mayor of the city and county of San Francisco specifically because in that internship at family school, she learned how to answer the phone. She went from, hey, hold on London. We say thank you for calling family school. How can I help you today? And that experience she points to is the critical moment in her life and her career trajectory to become the mayor of San Francisco. And that we see as our foot in the door to advance youth apprenticeship in the out years of this program. That's an incredible story. And I think just illustrates how there is just no shortage of opportunity for impact with youth apprenticeship work. In your role, do you see any challenges in leveraging the existing workforce system to create those connections and create opportunities for high schoolers to access apprenticeship opportunities? We do. And that's why I really like this kind of forum because we're there on the ground. And I mean, we're a big city, but we're not a huge city. But I do think the experience is certainly the chance to share. We learn from, especially with folks that are operating at the system, leaders like my colleagues here in the panel. Yeah. I mean, I think it's bias. There's kind of a baked in bias, especially if we're looking at, let me take it back. There can be. There doesn't have to be. But I think especially coming from a labor organizing background in the private sector, you've got to make the value proposition a lot to employers. You're asking for better wages, better benefits, different set of rules around this. And so you want to make a cost effectiveness argument or make a productivity argument about the skills of the workforce. I think with us in terms of moving unemployment equity agenda through apprenticeship, which is key to the vision that we are implementing for Mayor Breed, and where we're trying to close a gap where we have triple unemployment in the black community, double employment in the Latino community, disparities around gender. We have to be real intentional about we're not just moving opportunity. We're really trying to move this agenda and close these gaps. In fact, we measure such through the tools of the local Alliance for Racial Equity. The government Alliance for Racial Equity, GAIR. So one of the things I think we find is it's the same, it's the same like a lot of the conversations from the panels in the sessions when you're going to an employer that says, you know, we need skilled workers. I know we said we need workers, but we need skilled workers. Or what about somebody who's too young where there's questions about sometimes liability or insurance, or can they do the work? And I think for us in terms of really being intentional about an equity agenda, where all of us sort of really focus on the equity agenda, it really is about helping to overcome some of these biases, helping to elevate the success story. And then when you do have the employers that buy in, and when you do have folks who said, you know, maybe we took a chance on him or her coming in, but we're really proud, it's everything you've been showcasing us today here at Trident, and everything that you've been doing to us is really powerful to us to take back to our cities because you've really showcased the participants themselves. And I think that's the key to changing the mindset and moving the agenda through the employers. Ashley, do you mind? Please jump in. The standard workforce system. So as commissioner, we administer the funds for our workforce system, so the American Job Centers across Washington state. And I think what we're seeing is the systems as they're designed currently with federal funding are for out-of-school youth, if any youth at all. And I know that you see this in New Jersey as well, is right now those systems are actually not designed for youth apprenticeship and are not designed for all kids. Where we are seeing differences, like for example in Spokane, eastern Washington, they have a next-gen zone, but that is only because they have blended their federal funding with local philanthropists who they are able to receive anybody come one, come all and they don't have to worry about what box do you check for that individual. And so they've been able to expand from out-of-school youth to any youth. That said, primarily the systems have been designed historically, but they've just hired an apprenticeship coordinator in that AJC, that American Job Center specifically to work in this space and to coordinate their overall efforts so that they can overcome some of those historical biases that were well-intentioned. But that right now I think we need to ameliorate as a system. Yeah, and that coordination is just so key. And Rob, I understand you're doing a lot of that in your role and that your boss, the governor of New Jersey, Governor Murphy, is really all-in on apprenticeships more generally, really interested in expanding apprenticeships to non-traditional industries, new populations, especially youth. And I also understand that you're doing a lot of work to engage with some of your counterparts within K-12 and higher ed. So I'm hoping you can just talk a little bit about why it is that you and the governor and others are so bought into this idea of youth apprenticeship and also what it looks like to do that coordination work among so many different players. Well, thanks. One thanks for having me. Thanks for Paya. Thanks to NGA. Thanks to New America. Thanks to JFF. Thanks to everybody in this room for helping us come up with our plan in New Jersey for apprenticeship. We've done a lot of learning the past couple of years. We're 13 months on the job and I'm going to take Brad's strategy of starting fast and trying to slow down later. Governor Murphy was also ambassador to Germany, so obviously comes that mindset when I first met him before he was running, that's what we talked about. So it's ingrained us every single day that workforce development and economic development are the same thing. And that folks, like you say often, no one's coming to New Jersey for the low taxes. And so we're out there talking to businesses about growing or coming to New Jersey. Their biggest desire is workforce and talent. Our economic development authority just released their annual strategic plan and 60% of it lies in my department. And that's not by accident. And so we always talk about time about silos and sort of cliche after a while. And I feel like there's like a two-part answer after breaking down silos. One, and I'm very blessed to have a great leader and the governor. I'm not trying to kiss bucks. He's not here. He'll never see this. But he's really given the cabinet the wherewithal to make our own connections, to put our own systems together. Prior to New Jersey, you had to go to the governor's office to get permission to talk to a fellow cabinet member. And that goes back beyond other parties. So that's been a big part of it. I'm with our Secretary of Higher Education, Zaki Ellis Smith. She's from Las Vegas. She comes from Lumina. She gets this. Our K-12 commissioner, Lamont Rappallette and our economic development authority, director Tim Sullivan. We're pretty much together all the time. And so in the governor's office, try to have these convenings. Oh, let's get together and talk about this thing. We're already doing that. We don't need to have these special monthly meetings where you get together. So we're doing that every day. So there's two parts of it. The leadership is just the personality of trying to break through that silo, talking to your counterparts. And two, what are the policy changes that can be made to allow somebody to work together better? So two of the big things that we've done with higher ed and K-12, we announced, try to keep this short, in New Jersey, every school district, by the way, there's 606 school districts in New Jersey, which is a big challenge of ours. So yesterday, with the three superintendents who are up here talking about the change they can do in their school district, knowing they're touching, I'm guessing tens of thousands of kids, we have to go one by one to every school district because they are full home rule authority in their town. But part of the reason, in New Jersey, a big deal is your school report card. And you go back to school night, that's your principal wants to talk about, hey, parents, we got this on our school report card. Make sure your kids are coming to school, we're doing this, we got our grades up and property taxes matter, and where your home value matters is based on your school report card. But in the past, if your school sent a kid into an apprenticeship program, or if a kid went to an apprenticeship program, and not to college, they got the merits. So working with the State Board of Education, working with our Commissioner of Education, we now have a positive placement for apprenticeship programs in all of our school systems on the statewide report card. It's a very small detail, but it's a very big deal to change that inherent disincentive to apprenticeship. And then secondly, with working with the Secretary of Higher Education, we're reestablishing NJ Place. Place stands for Pathways Leading Apprentices to College Education. And in the past, when it existed, basically they did a lot of work trying to get folks who had gone through a Building Trades Apprenticeship Program college credit for what they had already completed. Our next envisioning of this going forward is going to be making sure apprentices are getting college credit while they're going through the program, so they can have a dual enrollment track, whether there's youth apprenticeship or anything else. So we're going to have a whole coordinating office to make sure that's happening. That's great. It's certainly been our experience at CareerWise. We've been so fortunate to partner with so many state-level players who've been willing to come to the table, collaborate, coordinate, knock down those silos, as was mentioned earlier. We certainly could not do the work that we do without that level and consistency of coordination. So I just don't think that can be emphasized enough. Great. Now, I was at skillful cleaning and the whole Bell Commission was there. And they sort of, like, how they were talking about how they worked together was sort of how I've worked back to George. Like, hey, this doesn't have to be a big deal. Right. Just get together on a regular basis and get things done. Yeah. I love it. I love to have good partners. So I'd love to ask you all one more question before we open it up to the audience for their questions. But as leaders at the state and city level, you all clearly care so very deeply about expanding opportunities for apprenticeships in your respective states and cities. But I believe you also believe that industry has to play a leading role in that work as well. So can any of you speak to perhaps any of the strategies you're considering or leveraging right now to make sure that industry is helping to lead and that you're making it as easy as humanly possible for employers to connect with apprenticeships as a talent development strategy? So I'm happy to start. So we did a trip to Switzerland with Governor Inslee in the fall of 2017. And in doing that, we brought many business leaders, along with philanthropists, government leaders, and academic leaders, but the business leaders and labor, thank you husband. And labor. And it was very motivational for them. And we came back and so I'll give you an example of Susan Malaney who's the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Washington. So we have a dearth of healthcare workers, as do most states in the United States. And she was so motivated that by the final evening she committed not just that Kaiser Permanente would move this forward and create apprenticeships for youth, but that she would also bring together her competitors to make sure that they were consistently driving this across the state. As they started getting their forward momentum, it became clear though that they needed to coordinate with labor. And so now labor and industry have come together in an industry sector around healthcare and they will have the first industry and labor registered apprenticeship in healthcare in the United States. And it'll be very exciting for Washington State to do this and is just one example. We're doing similar things in the advanced manufacturing and in the IT space as well. And in fact in the back I'll just call attention to Ma DeDon who's our lead for our Career Connect Washington effort and John Alvin from the governor's office who's here. And really it's because our governor was willing to convene and to bring folks to the table. So I think the key element there is having a convener. I love that comment before of convener and chief from the Birmingham mayor because it's so true. And then having industry leaders who themselves will have the courage to come forward and lead within your state, your city, your region to make it happen. And again I'll repeat what I shared before. It can't just be business invited. It has to be business invested. And they need to come to the table and the conditions need to be set that they will be able to get a return on their investment. This can't live in corporate social responsibility. It won't last. It needs to be core HR. And when you speak to Swiss businesses about this, where they have the highest labor costs in the world and you ask them how can you afford to do this to a company they'll say how can we afford not to do this. So. Here, here. Would anybody else like to comment on that? I think we had a good glide path coming in because our predecessor did create these talent networks that were based on industry partnerships. They were novel at the time. I think over time they just sort of started into meetings. So we sort of came in and took to the next step. So we already had them working together. Our New Jersey manufacturing extension program is rated by NIST every year as the top-performing in the country. They've been a big grantee of ours and a great partner of ours. We've increased manufacturing jobs year-over-year over the past four years. But I think just the overwhelming demand for talent right now is what's bringing them to the table. And I feel anxious to want to get everybody signing on the dotted line now that we're in this economy. But quite frankly, I don't think I think we'll be in this economy for a while. If not, there's still going to be a retirement boom that companies are going to have to deal with. So I think they see that, no matter what the site market is doing today or what the unemployment numbers are, that they're going to need to be wanting with us for long-term regardless. And I also think that, you know, I think some folks, oh, this is expensive. It's a lot of work. But at the same time, we're raising the minimum wage. New other worker-friendly policies in New Jersey. It makes it, you know, just do a pure cost-benefit analysis for the companies. It's becoming more and more less and less expensive because they already have to pay them these wages that are coming down the pike. And they see that taking apprenticeship dollars can be an incentive and a way to make that transition easier. Yeah. We have a few minutes left. I want to make sure we hear any questions from you all that may be on your minds in the couple of minutes we have remaining. I see a few hands. Abby, in the back. What you all are doing from the administrations around the public sector as employer, oftentimes in the communities we're working with, the public sector is the biggest employer and often somewhat challenging, particularly with civil service, et cetera, in New York. I'm going to, I'll take that for John. Because New Jersey, even though we're small, we have a lot of government, as I mentioned, 4606 school districts, 535 different towns, 21 counties, a bunch of different utility authorities, investment authorities, all have their own works department and everything else. So the guys running our apprenticeship in New Jersey, Nick Toth is here. They're very focused on public sector apprenticeship, mainly because they're a big employer. I also feel like we need to put our money where our mouth is. And so we're working on a program now with our Department of Transportation, with the Port Authority in New Jersey, our highway maintainers. We're working with our Department of Banking Insurance on insurance regulators. So basically everything that we're doing in apprenticeship, we're trying to figure out what our public sector angle is, not just to only lead by example, but also to provide a talent pool for not just our government employees, but also to the private sector. Because private sector employers have the same job needs, talent needs as a public sector in many cases. But civil service is a complication. But luckily civil service is in but not out of my department. So we can work closely with them on trying to come up with exemptions and trying to vary out some of the code to allow it to happen. Yeah, and just for San Francisco, we have made efforts but struggled until recent awakening or opportunity to turn lemonade, make lemonade out of lemons is that what they say. We had a big company called Sherriot, which is a private shuttle company, startup about a month ago, all of a sudden go out of business. Mayor Breed called us, our office, myself, the head of our municipal transportation agency to say, hey, in about an hour this company is going to shut down and lay off 240 drivers. She asked us to get out there and see about training them, work through civil service to get them on board with the city to drive buses where we have a shortage of about the same number of drivers. So I think through that experience we're going to announce very soon the results of that class when the new drivers start on Monday. But we've got, I think, through Mayor Breed's ingenuity here, a path to really do stuff around navigating, use a workforce strategy through civil service. We're looking a lot at L.A., thanks to John Dunn and some stuff he's been sharing, but we've had some progress as of late, but definitely it's a challenge. So we're an employer, 1,600 people all across Washington State, and we, I just started in July, but we are going to be hopefully spearheading along with our colleagues across state government an apprenticeship program down in Olympia and probably starting in the IT area, because it's very difficult to get enough IT talent and especially youth apprenticeship in partnership with the local community college and the local high schools. Along with that though, and it's been sort of a sub-factor in the conversations here, I am having my HR department re-evaluate every position description so that it says or related experience in addition to whatever degrees may have been previously determined. I know I personally actually wouldn't have gotten my job had it said, not said or related experience because I don't have the degrees required for my current position as stated. So those are a couple of the things that we are doing and I hope that we can do them quickly enough so that we can tap into this energy around moving ahead youth apprenticeship and create ideally a sector that is a government sector approaching this. And I'll just add very, very briefly in Colorado, we also have several state agency partners who employ youth apprentices along with our school district partners and these apprenticeships have actually been very popular among students. We've had a lot of applicants for the role and we just see it as such an incredible opportunity not just for skill building like in any apprenticeship, but to get an inside look and education into our countries and states public sector. So it's been really cool to see the student interest in those types of jobs as well. What other questions do we have from the group? Yes. I want to ask a question about technology as it relates to scale. Former Ambassador Levine, I really appreciate your point about all of the buzzing future of work conversations, how apprenticeship actually seems like a very human response and intervention in this problem. However, it seems like one of the big sort of questions before everyone hears, there's a lot of really good starts, but the problem is really, really big and it also seems like in the post-secondary higher education world more broadly there was sort of a first pass in online learning that maybe didn't get so well and then there's a second pass and there seems to be some traction there. How do you, all of you apprenticeship experts think about how technology may be leveraged to get it scale? How technology may be leveraged to get to scale. So a couple of things. You wove in there the conversation around online learning. I think that in terms where we've seen it, like in Switzerland for example online learning is not being embraced very heavily. It's being explored potentially for example when you have a rural situation and you need people to do things remotely but otherwise it's actually a lot about hands-on and having a hands-on experience and the technology training and equipping people for the future for example in automation, robotics development, web app development and whatever other ways it's actually done more in person than anything else. In terms of scale the model of remote online learning doesn't work in a job environment necessarily in time perhaps but I think right now to get our momentum overall online will be useful again in a rural setting in complimenting somebody having to travel but otherwise I think it really needs to be much more about in person. Josh would you like to speak to me? Yeah just really quickly because I think yesterday one of the big things is obviously we're trying to bring this model to scale collectively and as we get there we have to celebrate every apprentice we should ring a bell we were just at dinner last night and a new tech SF apprentice who our agency was just hired, Christie shared with us and I think the tech sector in San Francisco it's the epicenter in many ways but it's been a little bit slower to adapt the model there's been a couple dozen of apprentices that have come on board and we're able to think about getting this scale but one of the things I think that we've talked about especially as of late not so much we've got a cannabis apprenticeship of all things and a commercial driving apprenticeship yeah we legalized it but to tech the thing that's interesting is what we've thought about is using tech to again to overcome to do the educational component or not bias resistance but just help create the awakening and really something that honestly a lot of these tech companies using a technology platform really advanced I think in the language it's been a good tool for us but really also helping I'm going to give credit to Christie because she coined this phrase a lot of the tech companies and we've got like I said some of the nation's biggest right in our city they will quickly say apprentice we don't understand that but we do interns we'll do interns all day long so just kind of the language and the messaging and jumping into the frame Christie coined the phrase we now use with the tech employers apprenticeship is the new internship and then you start to get the buzz and the innovation and stuff so that's been a big help to get more apprentices in and she gets a royalty every time we say that you say that in your city right you trademarked it I like it apprenticeship is the new internship you're welcome for the additional dollars well thank you all so much for being such excellent panelists to help us close out these two days I hope you all will leave this discussion with a few additional nuggets a few additional ideas about how you can think about integrating that systems level view as you are out building your own youth apprenticeship programs in your city so with that if you all would join me in thanking our panelists I would appreciate it