Apprenticeships Are Evolving. Just Not Fast Enough.

What I saw at Borough of Manhattan Community College during National Apprenticeship Week — and why the work we're doing at We Connect The Dots and Nebula Academy can't wait for the system to catch up.

National Apprenticeship Week wrapped on May 2, and I want to keep the conversation going. Because if we let the celebration end with the week, we miss the point of why we celebrate at all.

This year's theme — America at Work: Making America Skilled Again Through Registered Apprenticeship — is the right banner. The Department of Labor reported that more than 386,000 new apprentices have registered toward the goal of one million. That's real progress. And on Wednesday of that week, the daily theme was specifically Expanding AI in Registered Apprenticeship, which tells you the system knows where the puck is going.

The question is whether it's moving fast enough to get there.

What I Heard at BMCC

I spent time this past week at Borough of Manhattan Community College listening to apprentices — students doing real work, on real teams, at firms most people would consider out of reach for a community college student. EY. Accenture. BMCC itself. They were calm, articulate, and clear-eyed about what their experience was actually teaching them.

A few things stood out.

They weren't there for a credential. They were there for a career. Every student I spoke with talked about the apprenticeship as the bridge — the thing that turned a class concept into a deliverable, a deliverable into a relationship, and a relationship into a path forward. That's what apprenticeship has always done well, and BMCC is doing it well now.

The employers are the ones who have evolved. EY and Accenture aren't running apprenticeships out of charity. They're running them because the talent model they relied on for thirty years is straining under the weight of AI adoption, hybrid teams, and the speed at which roles are being redefined. They need people who can learn on the job because the job itself keeps changing. Apprenticeship — paid, structured, mentored — is one of the few models built to handle that.

The students are ready for more than the system is offering. That was the part that stayed with me. The hunger is there. The capability is there. What's missing is enough on-ramps.

What We're Building at We Connect The Dots

This is exactly why We Connect The Dots invested in a pre-apprenticeship program in 2022, to widen the on-ramp before students hit the formal apprenticeship door.

We're focused on young adults and adults who want to explore careers in technology but haven't had access to the kind of structured exposure that makes a registered apprenticeship a viable next step. Our program meets them where they are and gives them hands-on experience in the skills that actually shape modern work: business process automation, AI tools and workflows, and the digital fluency that every apprenticeship program is now quietly assuming you walk in with.

A pre-apprenticeship is not a consolation prize. It's the runway. Without it, too many capable people get filtered out before they ever apply, not because they can't do the work, but because they've never been shown what the work looks like up close.

Why the Nebula Academy Collaboration Matters

The other piece of this is Nebula Academy. We're collaborating to support students stepping into apprenticeship opportunities specifically in artificial intelligence, a field where the traditional registered apprenticeship structure is still being built in real time. The standards are forming, the role definitions are still settling, and the employers leading on AI apprenticeship are doing it months ahead of the frameworks catching up.

That's where we can move quickly. Nebula's training pathways and our pre-apprenticeship pipeline are designed to get learners production-ready for AI roles that didn't exist eighteen months ago — AI project strategist, automation lead, AI-enabled operations roles inside healthcare, professional services, and logistics organizations that are hiring right now. We're not waiting for someone else to write the playbook.

Where the Traditional Model Is Falling Behind

Here's the honest part. The traditional apprenticeship model is one of the most effective workforce development tools this country has ever built. It is also struggling to keep pace with the kind of work most Americans are now doing.

Three gaps stand out:

The trades framework is being asked to stretch over knowledge work it wasn't designed for. Registered apprenticeship was built for a world where the master tradesperson and the apprentice were in the same shop, doing the same work, in the same place. A lot of modern apprenticeship — especially in AI, cybersecurity, data, and digital operations — happens across hybrid teams, async tools, and distributed mentorship. The standards need to acknowledge that and stop treating it as an exception.

The cycle time is too slow for the speed of new roles. A registered apprenticeship program can take eighteen to twenty-four months to stand up, sometimes longer when industry standards are still being negotiated. AI roles are being created and reshaped on a faster cadence than that. By the time a program is approved, the role has shifted. We need faster pathways for emerging occupations, with built-in mechanisms to update standards as the work changes.

The on-ramps are too narrow for the population we need to reach. Pre-apprenticeship is treated as a nice-to-have rather than core infrastructure. It should be the opposite. If we're serious about a million apprentices, we need a million qualified candidates, and that means investing in the layer that prepares people to enter, especially adults making mid-career transitions and young adults from communities the traditional pipeline has never reliably served.

What Has to Happen Now

I came back from BMCC energized and impatient at the same time, which is honestly the only way to feel about this work right now.

If you're an employer, the question isn't whether apprenticeship works, the data has answered that. The question is whether you're willing to host one, sponsor one, or co-design one for a role that doesn't have a federal standard yet. The answer needs to be yes more often.

If you're an educator or workforce leader, the question is whether your pre-apprenticeship offerings are real, current, and connected to actual employers, or whether they're still teaching skills that aged out two years ago.

If you're a policymaker, the question is whether the standards process can move at the speed of the work it's meant to govern. Right now, it can't. That has to change.

We're building what we can, where we can, as fast as we can. WCTD's pre-apprenticeship program, the Nebula Academy AI pathways, the partnerships with community colleges like BMCC and the employers stepping up, none of it waits for permission. But all of it would scale faster with a system willing to evolve at the pace of the workforce it's trying to serve.

The students I met this week are ready. The employers are ready. The model needs to catch up.

Laurie Carey is CEO of Nebula Academy and founder of We Connect The Dots, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit operating across 50+ U.S. cities to create career pathways and workforce opportunities. Author of "Resilience Is a Muscle".