 Hi, my name is Lancy Downs and I am a Policy Analyst with the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, or PIA, an initiative housed within the Center on Education and Labor at New America. This video is part of our Youth Apprenticeship 101 series, a collection of videos our team put together to answer frequently asked questions about youth apprenticeship. To view other installments in this series, please scroll down to this video's description which includes a link to the entire Youth Apprenticeship 101 series. And with that, let's dive into the topic for today's video, which is PIA's guiding principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship. By connecting students' learning needs with industry's talent needs, youth apprenticeship can be a powerful strategy for building a more inclusive American economy. To do this effectively, youth apprenticeship programs must provide a high-quality experience to both the young people who participate and to the employers who hire them. That's why PIA developed a set of five guiding principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship. Informed by experience and research, these principles define the characteristics required to successfully serve the many stakeholders in youth apprenticeship, including employers, educators, and above all, learners. PIA structured these five principles to be both practical and aspirational. Practically they provide clear guidance to industry, education, and community leaders as well as to state and local policy makers. As these partners work together to design youth apprenticeship programs, these principles can serve as a common starting point. At the same time, the principles set a high bar for program design, outcomes, and continuous improvement. In this video, we will explain each principle and why it matters for your youth apprenticeship program. Let's get started with the first one. PIA's first principle states that youth apprenticeships should be career-oriented. This means that learning is structured around knowledge, skills, and competencies that lead to careers with family-supporting wages. This principle is all about the value of your youth apprenticeship program. Youth apprenticeship programs should lead young people to a career that provides economic mobility. To make this possible, the program needs to teach students the knowledge, skills, and competencies that a particular industry values. This in turn requires the involvement of employers working directly alongside educators. Together, they should develop, sequence, and assess student learning in order to provide a coherent experience that better prepares students for the future. The second principle says that youth apprenticeship programs should be equitable. In equitable youth apprenticeships, learning is accessible to every student with targeted supports for those students adversely impacted by long-standing inequities in our education system and labor market. When designed well, youth apprenticeship can advance equity by increasing access to valuable, affordable, post-secondary credentials, and to paid work experience opportunities that are especially important for under-resourced youth. Paid work experience can help young people build social capital they might not otherwise be able to develop. These professional relationships and networks are often key to career advancement. Equity considerations are relevant in every single area of program design, and they deeply impact program outcomes. The equity principle requires all stakeholders in a youth apprenticeship partnership to recognize the inequities embedded in our education and workforce systems, to use data to unearth those disparities, and to design and develop interventions to address these inequities through youth apprenticeship. This includes, but is not limited to, student recruitment, career advising, on-the-job mentorship, and wraparound supports. Our third principle is portability. Portable youth apprenticeships, learning leads to post-secondary credentials and transferable college credit that expand options for students. In other words, participation in youth apprenticeship should expand rather than limit a young person's post-secondary opportunities. This is why youth apprenticeship is sometimes referred to as an options multiplier. To ensure apprentices reap the benefits of youth apprenticeship as an options multiplier, learning should be documented and recognized in the education system as credit, and by industry in the form of credentials where appropriate. In the education system, academic credit earned during an apprenticeship should be applicable towards an associate's or bachelor's degree, and also transferable to other post-secondary institutions. On the industry side, developing in-demand transferable skills through youth apprenticeship should be validated by an industry-recognized credential. I also want to note an important link between this portability principle and the equity principle we discussed earlier. For youth apprenticeship to advance equity for students adversely impacted by long-standing inequities in our education system and labor market, these credits and certifications should also be affordable for apprentices. Our fourth principle is adaptability. Adaptability in youth apprenticeship means that learning is designed collaboratively to be recognized and valued across an industry or sector. This principle is focused on businesses coming together to achieve common goals for the greater good of the industry. Youth apprenticeship is both an investment by an employer and future talent and an investment by students in their future selves. To protect these investments, employers across the sector must collaborate to ensure that the knowledge, skills, and competencies students acquire are not narrowly tied to any single employer, but instead are broadly valued across employers in an industry, sector, or region. This helps apprentices by ensuring that their skills have wider value. If they move to a different employer in the industry where they apprentice, for example, the skills and competencies they gain will be relevant to and valued by their new employer. Research has shown that this kind of collaboration among employers yields benefits for industry as well. When employers can reach consensus around the core skills workers need to succeed in entry-level roles and to advance in the field, they are able to build a more robust pool of talent trained in the skills they need. By working together to define skills, competencies, and on-the-job training requirements, employers create efficiencies in training processes and systems and help themselves retain skilled talent. And final principle is accountability. This means that student, employer, and program outcomes should be monitored using transparent metrics to support continuous improvement. Youth apprenticeship programs are supported by complex, mutually beneficial partnerships that include employers, post-secondary institutions, high schools, community-based organizations, industry associations, and others. With so many different partners involved, it is important that they all share responsibility for ensuring the success and continuous improvement of the program as a whole. Youth apprenticeship programs should collect, monitor, disaggregate, and publicly share data to evaluate the whole picture of apprentice and program performance. Student goals and expected outcomes should be explicitly named in the apprenticeship agreement to ensure accountability between the student, their school, and their employer. This transparency around data, outcomes, and performance helps employers, students, and their families make informed decisions. And it is part of an authentic commitment to equity. The accountability principle ensures that all partners produce strong outcomes for apprentices and employers. And it creates a culture in which each partner feels responsible for their part in ensuring apprentice and employer success. We hope this has been a helpful primer on PIA's five principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship. If you'd like to learn more, the resources linked below this video provide additional information about the principles. And if you'd like to learn more about how youth apprenticeship partnerships function, check out our next video, which covers the roles and responsibilities of different partners in youth apprenticeship. Thank you for watching.