National Youth Apprenticeship Summit Key Takeaways

Brad Rhorer, president and CEO of Ascend Indiana, delivers the opening remarks on the second day of the National Youth Apprenticeship Summit
CareerWise USA and the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA) hosted the National Youth Apprenticeship Summit in Indianapolis last week and Ascend Indiana was honored to play a role in welcoming youth apprenticeship professionals from across the nation. The summit focused on how to scale youth apprenticeship, and the agenda was jam packed with best practices from Indiana educators, employers, public-sector and philanthropic leaders as well as intermediaries like Ascend Indiana.
More than 300 attendees heard why and how Indiana employers are engaging to scale youth apprenticeship and learned how our state’s K-12, postsecondary and employer partners are changing systems and structures to ensure students can fully benefit from apprenticeship experiences. Attendees also visited apprentices across Indianapolis workplaces and met one-on-one with apprentices during after-session events.
Ascend’s Vice President of Consulting, Erica Viar, Director of Consulting, Alex Maggos, Senior Director of Consulting, Nioka Clark, and Manager of Consulting, Emily Morphew, attended the 3-day summit and share below several recurring themes:
1. Indiana is at the forefront of systems-level change, taking critical learnings from youth apprenticeship pilots over the past 4-5 years.
- These pilot programs have demonstrated the critical role intermediaries play in establishing youth apprenticeship experiences while also uncovering common challenges and barriers to scaling youth apprenticeship.
- These learnings have helped to inform Indiana’s recently released statewide professional pathway developed by a consortium of nearly 200 stakeholders through iLab.
2. Employers are key to unlocking the education and training system that meets their growing talent needs.
3. Federal policymakers are listening - there are key efforts happening across the nation to continue enabling youth apprenticeship.
As the Ascend team walks away from the summit, we reflect on a statement shared that we cannot “count success by just numbers alone” because that overlooks the quality of the experience and hinders efforts to scale these programs. As the work of iLab and Indiana’s youth apprenticeship programs continues to move forward, the learnings and takeaways from the summit will remain top of mind.