 My name is Mitchell Hart, founded the Dean of Apprenticeships at Trident Technical College in Charleston, South Carolina, and my team serves as an intermediary for the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship Program. I'm very excited to talk to you about a new tool that we're using as an intermediary to help our employer partners run their youth apprenticeship programs. What is my apprentice? Well, it was about a year and a half ago. One of the hardest, actually, let me step back a little bit. One of the hardest jobs as an intermediary that I've found, and I've been doing this for about 11 years, is to help our employer partners track the on-the-job training that they provide for our apprentices. In other words, the work processes with the competencies that they're required to learn to complete their apprenticeships. We're very good at helping design the apprenticeship and identifying those competencies and giving them manual checklists, but actually tracking the competencies has always been a challenge for us. So about a year and a half ago, I was sitting in a colleague's office and we were talking about this problem, and he told me about the apprenticeship that he went through 20 years prior to that. I mean, he said that when he got to his apprenticeship, the employer gave him the plan of what he needed to do to complete the apprenticeship, but also gave him a little black book and said that he was required to actually journal everything that he was doing over the next four years so they could use that to assess him at the end of the apprenticeship. And I thought it was a brilliant idea with the exception of being a black book. So being that kids these days had phones, I thought of the idea of, well, why don't we develop an app to actually let them do this? So really my apprentice was born based on that idea and that conversation. So what is my apprentice? My apprentice is an app that uses technology to track the job-related education, hours worked on the job, and the work processes required to be completed for a youth apprenticeship. All the data is collected using geo-offencing technology and input from apprentices, making it easier for the employers and supervisors to monitor the apprentice of participants and use it for validation at the end. Very similar to what my colleague did 20 years ago with his little black book. When we designed my apprentice, it's a brand new app and we wanted to design it based on four objectives. The first objective really is to provide apprentices roadmaps to help them understand what their apprenticeship program requirements are. It's very easy to understand what your classes are required for the apprenticeship, but sometimes it's very difficult to understand what work processes you have to learn to complete the apprenticeship. So really the first objective when we were designing the app was to provide apprentices roadmaps to help them understand their requirements. The next objective was really to provide a mechanism for apprentices to document their achievements to prove competencies. You know, again, one of the hard things to do on an apprenticeship is when you're going to work and you're being asked to do these things is actually prove that you're actually competent in those areas. So we wanted my apprentice to be able to serve as a mechanism to help the apprentice document what they're learning and improve that they actually know what they're talking about. The third objective is to serve as an assessment tool for employers to help manage the apprentices and evaluate their performance at the end. The way we wanted to use this objective is we definitely wanted to give access to the actual employers so they could see the information be entered by the apprentices and at the end of the apprenticeship actually use that information to assess them to award them a credential. In our case in Charleston, all of our youth apprenticeships are registered for the United States Department of Labor. So this is clear documentation that they completed everything that they needed to do to actually be awarded that national credential. And the fourth and final objective really is to serve as a mentoring platform for intermediaries, high schools, colleges, employers to help the apprentice be successful. One of the most important aspects of an apprenticeship or what I feel makes it different is that mentoring tool. And we're blessed in Charleston to have so many wonderful partners meaning high schools, employers, intermediaries, economic developers, but sometimes it's hard to communicate. So really the MyApprentice app enables and anyone who wants to mentor their apprentice or help us mentor their apprentice access to that information and to help them get through the apprenticeship. So MyApprentice tracks three things. It tracks the job-related education. It actually tracks the on-the-job training and also tracks the number of work processes or competencies completed on the job. So again, I talked about one of the objectives of the MyApprentice app was to actually create roadmaps for the apprentice to understand what they're required to complete. So the first roadmap that we completed was a job-related education. You'll see right here that every occupation has the required job-related education and the actual app for the apprentice to know. How does it track the GRE? The MyApprentice app, when an apprentice actually uses the app and they complete a course, what they'll do is they'll go in and they'll click the check mark as you can see on the screen. That check mark will go from black to green and also can put the completion date underneath the actual course. And when they actually complete the actual course, it will increase the percentage of JRE that they needed to actually complete the course. So once they complete all of the courses on the app and click the green check mark, it will be 100%. So the apprentice will know that they've completed all the required JRE as required for their apprenticeship. The other thing that MyApprentice does, it tracks the hours worked on the job. In other words, it gives them a roadmap board to see how many hours, months, and days that they've worked. If you actually look at this slide right here, you can see that it lists the name of the employer, the address of the employer, the wage of the employer, when they actually started their job and also clicks the months, days, and hours that they've worked using some pretty cool technology I'm fixing to talk about. But the reason why this is important is because all of our apprenticeships are 24 months long. So really, that percentage sign, when they actually achieve the 24 months, they'll actually have 100% there. How does it track the actual OJT in hours? There's cool technology called geofencing technology and you can actually click the next link. We're actually, if an apprentice actually programs their phone for location services, it allows the app to actually access their location services on their phone. When they actually get to the job, the app will automatically clock them in, as you can see on the screen. And when they leave their job, based on leaving the region, it will automatically clock them out. So it automatically tracks their hours and actually loads it into the previous screen that I talked about. If they don't wanna use the geofencing technology, they can also manually log the time in and out using a login, log off option. Probably the main reason as to why we developed my apprentice app was what I was talking about earlier was to track the on-the-job training or the work processes completed on the job. And that's really what the final roadmap is about. As you see right here, when the individual clicks the competencies completed option, it lists a roadmap with the work process that they're required to learn on the job. It also lists whether it can be done on the job or in the laboratory setting. What it does is you see with the arrow that's pointing to it, every single time they click or complete a work process, it will list the number of times they've did that over the two years. So how does it document the number of work processes? What it does is, but what it does is when you're actually going to the app, we're gonna, when they come home for work, you know, they go to their work and they complete a day's work, they come home and they journal, they journal what they did and how they journal really is very simple. They go into the app, click journal, and then they click new entry. And then what it's gonna do is gonna ask them a series of around 20 questions based on what their competencies are and if they did that at work. So if they answer yes to a question, it's gonna automatically log into the OJC competency goals that they completed that. So over the course of an apprenticeship, they could list, you know, that they've completed a competency 500 times or 50 times or 20 times. And that's important because all the apprenticeship programs here in Charleston are competency-based. So one of the ways that we're showing our employers that our apprentices are achieving competency is that they're documenting that they did a required process that their employer required so many different times. So if you did a process 50 times, you know, hopefully you're gonna be competent in that area. The other way that we're using my apprentice to prove competency is other than recording the number of times that our apprentice does a work process is the app will actually allow the apprentice to record what we call a talent showcase, meaning they can either video or audio record a required work process. They can explain it simply by doing a presentation like I'm doing, it will load into the app and go directly to the employer. Or if the employer allows it, they can get a fellow colleague to actually videotape them and demonstrating the actual skill. So really it's a really cool concept to show the employer that they not only did this a hundred times, but they also are explaining in their words or through demonstration that they know how to do the competency that the employer is required. My apprentice also has the ability for the employer to assess the apprentice at the end of the two years. So really, as you can see, the app actually gives the employer access to generate consolidated reports for all the JRE, all of the hours and also all of the competencies that they completed, including access to the videos that the actual apprentice does. And what it will do is actually give them a final competency assessment that when they complete it will go directly to their apprentice so they'll know that they've achieved success in the apprenticeship. The final tool that we use in my apprentice really is what we call a mentoring platform. I've talked a lot about apprentices and I've talked a lot about employers, but with our community partnership, we call it the Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship Program because it really consists of not only the college that serves as the intermediary and educator, but also 25 high schools, over 180 employers and a lot of different economic development folks who actually have accesses. And as I said earlier, we'll provide access to anyone who actually wants to help us mentor these folks so they'll be successful. So if you actually look at the screen, you can see what an employer would see in terms of it lists their apprentices so they can actually access and see all the information that I talked about. It actually, we actually give access to our faculty staff because we're gonna award college credit for some of the work that they're doing on the job. So we'll be able to give this information to faculty who will be able to assess the information and actually award a grade if the student wants it and also if the employer wants it. And also we give access to our high schools because our high schools help us mentor the apprentices if they're having problems when they're getting through the apprenticeship program. So that's my apprentice. You know, it's a wonderful tool that we started using this year and it's working really well for us. It's pretty cool to be able to see when our apprentice actually not only finishes a class but actually can see when they're working and also what they're doing on the work so we can help guide and mentor the actual employers to actually complete, you know, maybe they need to work on some other areas and anything. So it's a wonderful tool that is available out there and I'd like to thank you for your time.