Filling Gaps in Staff Capacity with Apprenticeships: The Urban Institute
For years, Urban Institute has been supporting employers to set up and expand registered apprenticeship programs as well as researching the effectiveness of youth apprenticeships. In 2021 they decided to hire their own youth apprentice to deepen their experience of the process. Building a meaningful role for their youth apprentice proved to be an invaluable, up-close education in youth investment, team building, and putting their research into action. We talked with Principal Research Associate Bhavani Arabandi and Senior Policy and Program Manager Zach Boren about their experience in onboarding and training their youth apprentice, Erikah, a Business Operations Associate, as well as the insights they have gleaned, benefits they’ve gained from the experience, and impact of how it’s shaping their on-going work.
Even as an expert in apprenticeship research, Arabandi recalls learning a lot about youth apprenticeship while onboarding the CareerWise DC apprentice she now supervises. “When you hire a new adult employee, they’ve already got the requisite education for the job that you’re hiring for. They often know what a workplace looks like.” Arabandi shared that she quickly learned “when you’re working with a youth apprentice, this might be their first introduction to a professional workplace and we cannot take things for granted. So our onboarding has to take into consideration a lot of things, including introducing concepts of a professional work environment, working as a part of a team, and representing the organization to external stakeholders.”
It was a learning experience that Arabandi found so valuable that she weaved it into the technical assistance that the Urban Institute provides to sponsors of registered apprenticeship programs across the country. “We were able to translate our experience and talk to employers about how they can approach onboarding youth apprentices,” Arabandi says. “And, in fact, we’re putting together a resource for employers to onboard youth apprentices, based on our own experiences.”
Urban Institute has hosted numerous interns in the past, but the depth and intensity of length of CareerWise DC apprenticeship makes this a unique opportunity. What Urban Institute had committed to was, as Arabandi put it, “not just a two week commitment, or someone who’s coming in to do a job shadowing or something like that. This is a long term commitment for three years, and our youth apprentice started when she was a senior in high school.”
That meant that Arabandi and others on staff at the Urban Institute had to think differently about training this new hire. They had to initially focus on teaching and reinforcing skills that “we take for granted as adults.” These included “time management, organizational skills, and learning how to prioritize tasks.” During this training, Arabandi noted that they wanted to make sure Erikah knows that she’s a valuable member of the team even while she is building core skills because she brings a fresh perspective, curiosity, and positive energy. “Her contributions are really important. And we rely on her for certain things, as a part of the team.”
But Arabandi notes that creating a successful team member also means acknowledging the increased expectations that the apprentice faced. “When you’re in school,” she says, “the only audience for the papers you write is your instructor. But in a professional work setting we’re saying, ‘you have to work with different members of the team, and here’s how you do it, and here’s how we depend on you as a part of the team.’”
The efforts Arabandi and her team made paid off within the first six months of Erikah’s arrival when they faced a staffing shortage and a big annual deadline. “In May we lost a team member who was heading off to law school. It is one of our busiest times of the year, because we’re dealing with supporting a lot of companies with incentive funding for the apprenticeships that they’re creating,” says Boren, going on to explain that Erikah “really stepped up in a big way into our former employee’s role” and that they “were dependent on Erikah” to help close out the project. Erikah stepped into that role because she demonstrated the skills needed to do the job.
“Ultimately,” he says, “we were successful at closing out that project” and both Arabandi and Boren attribute a meaningful part of this success to Erikah.
The experience has been so positive that Boren and Arabandi have gone from apprenticeship researchers to champions. “We would not only recommend an apprenticeship to anybody who approaches us but also share our own experience,” Arabandi says.
Reflecting on her experience so far, Erikah shared how her time with Urban Institute as an apprentice has helped her gain valuable experience she needed, from when she attended high school at McKinley Technology High School to Xavier University where she now studies. “I really didn’t know what an apprenticeship was before, I just thought it was like an internship. I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be great on my college resume, allow me to get more experience, and kind of step outside the box,’” Erikah says. “Now I have a sense of how to navigate everything, and step outside of my comfort zone, and gain the experience that I need to be successful.”
After graduating from high school in June 2022, Erikah decided she wanted to enroll in college and continue the apprenticeship at the same time. While different from the original plan, Boren and Arabandi are fully supportive of her decision and excited to continue to expand her role at Urban Institute. “We’re excited to kind of blaze some new territory and figure out how to make this work,” he says, “both for our needs at Urban, but also [her] growth as a college student, as an apprentice, as a young person.”
While bringing on an apprentice may seem new and challenging, Urban Institute’s experience shows that it can be a positive, worthwhile talent development strategy that brings unique perspectives to organizations and contributes positively to youth. You can learn more about CareerWise DC’s apprenticeship program, CareerWise DC, here.
Photo: © Garrett Rowland for the Urban Institute.
