How apprenticeships can bridge the employment gap for workers without college degrees

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Well, the pandemic has made this a most unusual time in the labor market. Millions of lost jobs are not yet filled.

  And yet, still, there are reports of labor shortages in many sectors and a large percentage of workers who say they are looking for a new job. For some without a bachelor's degree, job prospects were bleak even before the pandemic.

  Paul Solman looks at a program that is offering better opportunities.

  It's latest in our Work Shift series.

• Paul Solman:

  Adquena Faine's last job before the pandemic, driving for Uber and Lyft in Virginia.

• Adquena Faine:

  I was driving so much, I would lay down and try to take a nap or go to sleep, and I still felt the vibrations of the car.

• Paul Solman:

  No time or money to finish college, barely able to feed her daughter and pay for a hotel room after foreclosure on their home, food for herself.

• Adquena Faine:

  Before I got on the road to drive, I would stop and forage in the woods or like on the side streets.

• Paul Solman:

  You were actually foraging for food at some point? I have never heard that before.

• Adquena Faine:

  People will stop and ask, what are you doing? And I'm like, oh, nothing, because I don't want anybody to start coming to pick my food.

  (LAUGHTER)

• Paul Solman:

  In Louisiana, Jennifer Burgess went straight from high school to dog training.

• Jennifer Burgess:

  For 15 years, I have actually trained over 10,000 dogs.

• Paul Solman:

  And so how much money did you make there?

• Jennifer Burgess:

  On my best year ever, maybe 28.

• Paul Solman:

  Twenty eight thousand dollars?

• Jennifer Burgess:

  My best year ever.

• Paul Solman:

  Mariana Perez was 20 when she emigrated from Mexico in 2005, without a high school degree or even any English, spent nine years working in a North Carolina nail salon.

• Mariana Perez:

  I used to work 60 to 70 hours a week.

• Paul Solman:

  Sixty to 70?

• Mariana Perez:

  Yes.

  I had no benefits. We don't have any vacation pay. So, if you don't work, you don't earn money.

• Paul Solman:

  On the plus side, however:

• Mariana Perez:

  I miss some of my clients. They were very, very nice people.

• Jennifer Burgess:

  I love working with dogs.

• Paul Solman:

  But the pay?

• Jennifer Burgess:

  I went from $6.10 an hour to $11.25 an hour over 15 years.

• Paul Solman:

  Two problems have plagued the U.S. economy for decades now, income inequality and young folks not working at all. Low pay for those with just high school or less is an obvious explanation.

  Byron Auguste, President and Co-Founder, Opportunity@Work: Sixty percent of Americans in the work force today do not have bachelor's degrees.

• Paul Solman:

  But, asks economist Byron Auguste:

• Byron Auguste:

  Why is there such a difference in earnings between people who are college graduates and people who are not in this country?

  It's simply not the case that not having a bachelor's degree means that you don't have skills to contribute. Thirty million today have the skills, based on the work they're doing, for jobs that pay at least 50 percent more than the jobs they're in.

• Paul Solman:

  Meanwhile, employers are begging for employees, boasting $20 an hour, where once $15 was thought magnanimous. But $20 an hour is barely $40,000 a year.

• Narrator:

  These are the computers.

• Paul Solman:

  OK, time for one more player in this story, IBM, once the icon of high tech in America.

• Narrator:

  These machines are things of gleaming, varicolored metal and numerous flashing lights.

• Paul Solman:

  Selling and servicing huge computers, Big Blue and its big machines were attacked by little Apple with its mini Mac back in 1984. IBM was worth 30-something times the value of Apple as a company back then. Today, Apple is worth 16 times as much as IBM.

  And yet IBM has survived by cutting costs drastically, including layoffs, changing its business, outsourcing, and it still employs 350,000 people worldwide.

  Here in the U.S., however, it finds itself competing for talent witness the trendier Apples, Googles and start-ups.

  So, Kelli Jordan spearheads IBM's new collar initiative.

• Kelli Jordan:

  Back in 2016, we really started looking at how we could fill roles that we had just struggled to fill in other ways.

  Just saying you don't require a bachelor's degree brought in a whole new slate of candidates that we never would have uncovered.

• Paul Solman:

  And you knew this was coming, right? The new collar candidates are folks like Faine, Burgess, Perez, and, in New York, Ray Rodriguez, who spent 11 years working his way up to assistant store manager at a big drugstore chain.

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  I used to make $46,000 a year, and then it dropped down to 40.

• Paul Solman:

  As you got promoted?

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  Right. It was salary. And then they changed it to hourly.

• Paul Solman:

  But that wasn't the worst of it.

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  Oh, my God. When I walked in the bathroom one day, I seen feces everywhere. It's like, how do you get it on the wall? And then there's a couple of times where people passed out in the bathroom.

• Paul Solman:

  Shooting up.

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  Shooting up. And we got to call the paramedics.

• Paul Solman:

  Rodriguez, supporting a family, was desperate to get out of retail.

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  I used to always picture people with their 9:00-to-5:00 jobs, weekends off. They don't got to work nights. There was times where I would have to work overnights as well. And I was always like, oh, I wish I could have a job like that.

• Paul Solman:

  Well, why couldn't you get out?

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  Without a degree it seemed like everywhere else was the same.

• Paul Solman:

  And then he heard of IBM's electronics lab apprenticeship, applied, got an interview.

  Were you scared?

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  Yes, I was scared. This is a dream job. The 9:00 to 5:00 that I have been dreaming about for years and years, this is what I was looking for.

• Paul Solman:

  So what was it about these folks that got them into IBM?

• Kelli Jordan:

  Things like a growth mind-set, that willingness to constantly challenge and put themselves out there, take that little bit of a risk and build their skills on a very regular basis.

• Narrator:

  The rapid advance of IBM technology.

• Paul Solman:

  IBM is trading on its long history of training its employees to scale up its apprenticeships, investing $65 million, as well as plenty of federal money, into earn-while-you-learn programs that usually segue into permanent jobs.

  The company says at least half its U.S. jobs no longer require a bachelor's degree. But, for those without one, even applying can be a challenge.

  Take Faine's online interview for her apprenticeship.

• Adquena Faine:

  So, I had this old laptop that is decrepit and kind of takes an hour to start up, to boot up. When I try to do the Webex, it fails.

  I'm crying. Like, tears are pouring out of my eyes. This was my shot, and I just blew it.

• Paul Solman:

  Burgess had a similar snafu.

• Jennifer Burgess:

  On my way to the IBM interview, my car actually died on side of the road. And my parents had to come and help me, because it overheated. And then I get to the interview and it dies in the garage.

  And I have to, in heels and a dress, push it into the parking spot.

• Paul Solman:

  And all these folks were intimidated by the name IBM.

• Adquena Faine:

  In my mind, IBM is this big computer company, white men, suit and tie, carrying around a briefcase, business-savvy with all of the technical jargon.

  This is for the B-7000 8.2.

• Paul Solman:

  But look who's talking technical now.

  Can anybody learn to do what you do?

• Adquena Faine:

  I think anybody with the drive to can.

• Jennifer Burgess:

  It doesn't matter what you are or your background is. It doesn't mean that your brain can't do it.

  Now go ahead and walk forward.

• Paul Solman:

  Despite her canine credentials, Jennifer Burgess is now a project manager, or maybe it's because of them.

• Jennifer Burgess:

  It's very similar to dog training, because it's about training the humans to be able to do what you need them to do.

  When they are good, though, you need to give some form of reward.

• Paul Solman:

  Give folks like this a chance, and there are hidden bonuses for the employer, lower pay than the highest-priced talent, higher loyalty.

• Mariana Perez:

  Because they gave me the opportunity that other people did not.

• Reinaldo Rodriguez:

  I'm not going anywhere. Did you not hear where I came from?

  (LAUGHTER)

• Paul Solman:

  And with that, a final warning to those of you in corporate America from Byron Auguste.

• Byron Auguste:

  We hear about labor shortages. We hear about skills shortages. We hear about a war for talent.

  If you overlook half the talent pool in the United States, that is not a good talent strategy. And serious, smart companies are realizing that an enormous opportunity is among those that do not have bachelor's degrees.

• Paul Solman:

  For the "PBS NewsHour," Paul Solman in North Carolina.