spilled out into the broader business world.
Two years ago in California, then lieutenant
governor Gavin Newsom announced a plan
to add half a million high-skilled apprentice-
ships by 2029—a 500 percent increase for the
state. And last year, IBM and the Consumer
Technology Association (CTA) launched a coa-
lition to scale thousands of these on-the-job
tech training positions across the country.
As this has happened, though, many small
businesses have asked a reasonable question:
How can they afford the time and money
to put together a whole education program?
This is where a third-party company like
OpenClassrooms comes in to connect the dots.
OpenClassrooms was founded in France
in 2013, and it works like this: When a com-
pany needs apprentices, the OpenClassrooms
team finds and vets applicants. Selected can-
didates then split their time between work
and online classes that are project-based and
designed for the specific needs of the employ-
ers. Each apprentice is also matched to a ded-
icated mentor for weekly hour-long meetings
via videoconference. It’s a 12-month program
that, according to OpenClassrooms founder
Pierre Dubuc, usually ends with the company
hiring its apprentices full-time.
In Europe, two-thirds of OpenClassrooms
clients are startups and small businesses.
After expanding to the U.S. two years ago and
becoming part of the CTA coalition, Dubuc
says he’s committed to serving small businesses
here as well. If his program is financially out of
reach for some entrepreneurs (it typically costs
around $5,000 to $15,000), the government
can help with grants that are available from
the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s pretty cool,
especially for startup companies and small
businesses that want to hire one developer or
two data analysts,” says Dubuc. “They can have
access to this program and actually be subsi-
dized to run these apprenticeships.”
As companies consider whether to bring on
apprentices, many often ask Dubuc the same
question: What if I invest all this time and
money training an apprentice, only to have
them jump ship when it’s done? That’s a possi-
bility, as it is with any employee. But advocates
argue that the benefits outweigh the risks.
First, they say, the arrangement cuts both
ways. Companies get to fully test out a poten-
tial hire for a year, without having to commit
to them. And for what it’s worth, studies find
that the process breeds employee loyalty. One
survey in the U.K. of more than 4,000 employ-
ers who had used an apprenticeship program
found the mean retention rate (of the trainees
still working for the company) at 73 percent.
Advocates say that programs like this can
level the playing field, giving smaller com-
panies a way to staff up despite all the perks
being offered by their larger competitors. “For
me, the war for talent has been never-ending,
trying to compete against both the shortage
of talent and the resources of huge tech giants
who also have deeper pockets,” says Marty
Reaume, a former tech executive at Twilio and
Fitbit, who now sits on OpenClassrooms’ U.S.
advisory board. “But ultimately, some of us are
getting future-focused by looking to build and
develop our own talent.”
And critically, they say, apprenticeships
can draw in diverse and unconventional tal-
ent. Many of the public-private apprentice-
ship programs have formed around the goal
of increasing diversity in all kinds of higher-
skilled jobs—from Apprenticeship 2020,
a $3.2 million effort in Chicago, to TechSF
Apprenticeship Accelerator, the name of the
San Francisco program, which focuses on
women and people of color.
Jocelyne Umanzor is one of the women
who went through TechSF’s program. The
22-year-old says she never would have
thought of working in IT. Meanwhile, the
Silicon Valley delivery startup Postmates
would likely never have found Umanzor
in the open market. She went to Skyline
College, not MIT, and didn’t have the net-
work a place like that often affords.
But through the San Francisco program,
Umanzor connected with Postmates and
apprenticed there while getting an online
education in IT, and then transitioned into
a full-time role there. “It’s like a big door has
opened for me,” she says. Postmates is happy,
too. “We need people in IT who look like the
people they support, and we need people
writing the code who look like the end user,”
says Claire Sands, the company’s director of
communications and engagement. “That’s
something that TechSF apprenticeships have
really been able to fill for us.”
Meanwhile, at OneWorld, Fiona
McDougall used her apprenticeship program
in a slightly different way: She plucked her
office administrator off the front desk and
trained the woman to become the digital
marketer they needed. “It was a great experi-
ence overall,” says McDougall. “There’s some
very resourceful, employable talent in the Bay
Area, and this is a way of helping small busi-
nesses leverage that talent in a realistic way.”The Big Idea