John Dunn, from Bay Area Community College Consortium (BACCC), on Making Apprenticeship Simpler

Intro

Welcome to another episode of Making Apprenticeship Simpler interviews. I'm Patrick Cushing, your host, and today we're joined by John Dunn, the Regional Director of Apprenticeship for the Bay Area Community College Consortium (BACCC). In this episode, John shares his extensive background in the apprenticeship system, which ranges from his start as a high school teacher to roles in the state labor agency and community college chancellor's office. With family ties to apprenticeship, John brings a unique and passionate perspective to the table.

We'll explore ways to simplify the apprenticeship system, focusing on strategies to incentivize employers to get on board. John discusses innovative solutions like creating an employer of record to handle HR burdens and developing regional apprenticeship standards to streamline the process. If you're interested in understanding the future of apprenticeships and how we can make them more accessible, this episode is for you. Stay tuned!

Highlights

• Primary Question: How to Make Apprenticeships Simpler

• Simplifying the System for Employers

• Need for incentivizing employers to say yes to apprenticeships

• First Area: Incentives

• Possible incentives like tax credits, funding, and reducing financial burden

• Creative approaches to make the process easier for employers

• Second Area: Human Resources & Intermediaries

• Taking human resources (HR) burden off employers

• Introducing intermediaries to handle HR, worker’s compensation, and liability concerns

• Example from Australia: Staffing agency model for apprenticeships

• Third Area: System Navigation: Regional Apprenticeship Standards

• Creating Geographic Apprenticeship Standards

• Consistency in standards to avoid one-off cases

• Focusing on particular industry sectors within a region

• Benefits for Colleges as collaboration among colleges without each needing separate standards

• Shared curriculum and course catalog across colleges within proximity

• Closing Thoughts and Reflections

• Recap on apprenticeship improvement on apprenticeship initiatives, grants regionally.

• Colleges would see enrollment and student success, with having the same curriculum and course catalog available to them.

Transcript

Patrick Cushing:

Hey, John, thanks for joining us. As we've done with other folks, we're going to chat a little bit about the apprenticeship system and how to make it simpler today. Everybody else who's listening, this is John Dunn. I'm going to let him introduce himself, give him some perspective on his background in the apprenticeship system first.

John Dunn:

Thanks. It's good to be here. Thank you for collecting all this information. Currently I'm the regional director of apprenticeship for the Bay Area Community College Consortium, which is a regional grouping of the 28 colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, from Napa, Santa Rosa, all the way down to Monterey and Salinas area. My job is to provide technical assistance, support, guidance, you name it, for the 28 colleges in the region as it relates to apprenticeship and pre apprenticeship and even wiggling into work based learning in some ways. Cause that connects. Previous to that, I was at the state labor agency working on apprenticeship, the community college chancellor's office, the Department of Education, and I started my career as a high school teacher for ten years here in Elk Grove and Sacramento area. So I've kind of got a broad range of interests and experiences in that way.

Patrick Cushing:

And I think I've heard you say once, John, that your dad was an apprentice.

John Dunn:

It was my grandfather.

Patrick Cushing:

Your grandfather. There we go.

John Dunn:

This thing back here is my grandfather's apprenticeship completion certificate as a machinist for the Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe Railway in Richmond, California, and he completed his apprenticeship in 1927. So thankfully, we found that six, seven, eight years ago, I didn't even know he was an apprentice. And so apparently I'm supposed to be doing this, which led to finding out my other grandfather was also a pipefitter apprentice in the Martinez Concord area, too. So there you go.

Patrick Cushing:

There we go. For everybody watching, we didn't plan that. I mean, I heard you give that speech, but I had no idea that that was up there.

John Dunn:

It looks better than any diploma I've got, actually.

Patrick Cushing:

All right, John, so there's one question we're doing with everybody we talk to. Really curious to hear, from your perspective, how do we make the apprenticeship system simpler?

John Dunn:

One of the things that continues to come up over the last ten to even 15 years, but even more so more recently as we've gained momentum and there's more conversation about apprenticeship is to find a way to incentivize employers to say yes. And that can come in different forms. We've had these conversations about straight tax credits, funding, ways to take some of the financial burden off of the employers, but it boils down to finding a creative way to make it easier for them to say yes. One area that we're really delving into recently is how do we figure out a way to maybe take some of that human resources burden off of the employer and create an employer of record so that the apprentice is not specifically employed by the employer itself themselves, but by another agency that can handle the human resources back end the workers compensation. Some of the liability concerns that come up when we show employers the apprenticeship contract. Their attorneys get involved. In Australia, I was able to find visit there a year and a half ago, and they, they operate in kind of that way as a staffing agency.

John Dunn:

They have these intermediaries there that work a lot like a staffing agency, but for apprenticeship. They are the employer of record. They do the pre screening, the hiring, things like that. I've seen a few examples. Right now I'm kind of focused on that employer of record area. But really, how can we find a way to incentivize employers to say yes?

Patrick Cushing:

I love that because at the end of the day, I think there's a lot of talk in apprenticeship about funding side of things, a whole bunch of things that don't touch on. I think the core of what makes apprenticeship successful is that an employer has to want to take on an apprentice. If historically, culturally, we don't have that baked in, how do we incentivize employers to want to do so? You already answered this a little bit, but if I was to just ask you a different way, if you had a magic wand and could get employers involved beyond maybe the employer records, is there anything else you think could be done to make it easier for employers to say yes?

John Dunn:

I think we need to create more regional or sub regional geographic apprenticeship standards so that, say, a college or a workforce development board or a nonprofit organization of some sort holds the standards and they are consistent so that we don't create one offs all over the place unless it's necessary. We have a few employers that maybe work in aerospace or other industries that need to kind of contain their apprenticeship, but we have the occupations and the skills needed are generic in many ways so that we could have one set of apprenticeship standards in a particular region that focuses on employers in that industry sector and makes it easy, eliminates some of the pain of getting new standards approved. I think that's something that we're working on in the Bay region. I know some of the other community college regions are thinking about that also.

Patrick Cushing:

Fantastic. Yeah, I think if you want to become an expert in the apprenticeship system, you want to go down and create your own standards, go for it. But it should be a lot easier. Just pick something off the shelf and move on and not have to learn everything that comes with being an apprenticeship program, a whole new lingo, registration standards, things like that.

John Dunn:

Yeah. And I think some of our colleges, with the California apprenticeship initiatives, grants, it's become college based in some ways, but we are working more regionally with some of those grants so that the colleges understand from that perspective, there's a win that needs to happen with the colleges in terms of enrollment and student success, that not every college needs to hold the actual standards, but that college has the same curriculum and course catalog available to employers as the college 25 miles away. You don't both have to have standards approved to be successful.

Patrick Cushing:

Makes sense. John, I love it. I appreciate your perspective. Thanks for joining us, and we'll let you go today. Thank you. Ciao.