What Workforce Professionals Need to Know About Apprenticeships

Rocky Rockhold joined Engage by Cell with insights into apprenticeship programs. Find the transcript and time stamps below.

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[00:00:00] Max Schelkopf: And I will introduce myself. My name is Max Shelkopf I am with Engage by Cell, and I am a senior mobile solutions consultant, and my primary job is to work with workforce development folks and other organizations. I do a lot of the government contracting and assisting for Engage by Cell. I will let Rocky introduce himself.

[00:00:24] Rocky Rockhold: Good afternoon, everyone. Rocky Rockhold, Greater Ohio Workforce Board Program Director have lots of things that that we're responsible for. And I'll get into many of those when we dive into our presentation, but just wanted to say, thank you for joining us and please feel free to make this a dialogue.

If you have some questions or thoughts, put those right in the chat for us. We, we love to hear from you.  

[00:00:47] Max Schelkopf: Fantastic. And we're also joined behind the scenes by my marketing director, Anna. So. Okay. If you hear Rocky and I saying Anna next slide or previous slide or talking to her she is a real person But next slide Anna So a little bit about Engage by Sell we've been in business for I think it's actually over 16 years now.

I think we're actually more at the 17 or 18 year mark and we started in the bay area out in California and we're now based in Nashville, Tennessee. So those folks from Nashville, I but we specialize in all things related to mobile device based engagement, right? So text messaging and mobile web app platforms and really just kind of.

Engagement and information accessibility is what we specialize in and a couple of the, you know, kind of main markets that we assist, workforce development, adult ed. Apprenticeship, youth programs, etc. Things of that nature. So, some of the client examples here Middlesex County, New Jersey. I believe they were our first workforce development client going back almost a decade ago now.

But some other great folks on that list that we've been working with for a long time. So, and I will let Rocky introduce his organization a little bit on the next. Oh, sorry, I apologize. We do have a couple of questionnaires here, a little poll that'll give Rocky and I some insight on to kind of what everybody's level of knowledge and why they're attending today, wanting to learn more about apprenticeship programs.

So question number one, are you currently running an apprenticeship program? Pretty self explanatory there. And then how much do you know about apprenticeship programs? And I'll be honest with you, I would fall under the category of, I don't know very much. And that's why we're here to learn more from Mr.

Rockhold today. So if you want to take another 10 seconds, maybe to answer those. And then we'll jump on to a little introduction of the Ohio, Greater Ohio Workforce Board.

Right. Perfect. Let's see results here. So, very surprising. We got 30 percent roughly on the yes, they're currently running. So that's fantastic. Probably because that means people are here to learn about it. Right. And very few people are experts there. So this should be a very good educational session for everyone.

And then I would say most people are probably falling into the latter half like myself. So. Good to know and Rocky, I'll let you go ahead and introduce the greater Ohio workforce board and discuss a little bit about what makes you a little bit different. Probably than a lot of the workforce boards that are out there, but.

[00:03:43] Rocky Rockhold: Fantastic, thank you. And everyone, thank you for participating in that poll. That is certainly helpful to to give us some idea. Now that the percentage of you that said you were experts, I do expect to hear from you on here because I expect to learn a little something as well. So, please feel free to throw some things in the comments and and chat with us as we go about this.

This is by no means me lecturing anyone on on apprenticeship or other programs. It's just sharing, sharing our experiences on what we've done and and how we do it. Great Ohio workforce board has the name indicates we are in Ohio. We are 1 of 20 workforce boards in Ohio. 1 of the things that makes us unique as we represent 43 of the 88 Ohio means job centers.

So, for those of you outside of Ohio, and there are many on this call. Call that's your America's job center. So it's your it's it's branded Ohio means job centers in Ohio. So if you hear me mention Ohio means job center, which we call it a lot, that's what I'm referring to. So, I'll try to stay away from acronyms.

I know they are the death of us at the government, but I'll do my best to stay away from them. However, if I don't, and there's something that I'm giving an acronym for, and you're not sure what it is, throw that in the chat. We'll make sure that we answer that for you, but I'll do my best. To navigate away from them.

Beauty of of Ohio means jobs and the beauty of greater Ohio workforce board is that if you ever saw us on a map and I always tell people I'm going to show this and then I chicken out at the last minute. But if you ever saw Ohio on a map, and we highlighted the area that we cover, it doesn't line up at all.

We are all the way from Northwest Ohio, all the way down the Southeast and we circle our capital of Columbus. So we're all over the place and people will many times look at that map and they'll say, there's just no way this works. There's just no way. And so what we found is that it absolutely works.

And 1 of the many projects or programs that we've ventured down the path on is apprenticeships. So we're going to talk a little bit about apprenticeships before I do that. I always want to share with folks. The reason people are have that commissioners or local government wanted to be part of our group, part of greater Ohio workforce board, because I think it's important to understand.

So, big reason. Number 1, it's a cost savings because we are large, because we have 43 counties, 43 Ohio means job centers. We're able to save those locals money. And what I mean by that is, as most of, you know, Boards are able to take 10 percent of their federal funding right off the top. So when it comes, board can take 10%.

That's their operating cost. We actually take about 3. 7%. Thus pushing the rest of it back out into our locals for program dollars. So, right away, if you're a smaller rural county, you're going to get more money because the formula shows, hey, this is how it works. The other reason that that we love it is we can do a friendly transfer of funds.

So I have max over in county X. He doesn't have much going on. He's not doing a great job spending his funds, but I have Anna over in County A and she's got a huge project. She has a new company that's come in spending lots of money. We can friendly transfer money from 1 to the other, thus not sending money back to the feds.

So that's a, that's a big deal for us. Last, but not least, the, the Department of Labor only cares about performance from your area. So, if we have Max in again in area X, who's performing really, really well, he's going to help somebody in area B. that's not performing so well. So, those 3 reasons are why we exist at the huge level that we do and why we've been successful.

I can tell you, we've never sent money back to the feds as an area. Not a dime. We do friendly transfers. We share. We make sure that that our areas are covered and we have never failed a performance measure. Actually, let me backtrack on that. We've only failed 1 performance measure ever. It was back in the 2009, 2010 time when we were obviously trying to figure out how to how to run stimulus programs at that time, because the economy had tanked.

So that's why us. So why why apprenticeships? Why are we in the game of apprenticeships? Biggest reason is, is that we are very heavy on our board with employers as we're required to be. However, we are much heavier than others. You're supposed to operate. We operate at about a 70 percent of our board members, our business, their employers out of that.

About 40 percent of those are manufacturing. So we run into this conversation of, hey, how do we help these folks? Right? We're trying to figure that out. So we are the only board to dive into this thing in the state of Ohio and say, we're going to be board sponsored. We're going to we're going to be a sponsor for apprenticeships.

Now, I'm going to tell you this is full disclosure. I didn't even know what that meant. I had no idea what that meant. I literally was in an executive meeting. I leaned over to our board chair and said, why, why aren't we a sponsor? Can't you be a 3rd party sponsor? Why aren't we doing that? And by the time the meeting ended, he had mentioned to everybody openly that Rocky was going to figure out how our board would become a sponsor for apprenticeship and we would do it.

So I didn't know anything about it. I, I spoke up when I should have stayed quiet. I guess, but I didn't. Why are we the only board? It's labor and it's time intensive. It's a heavy lift. It's a heavy lift. Our standards packet for our area is about 62 pages long. So that's our standards for what we get approved and have had approved.

The other reason is people don't want to be monitored or audited. Right? I know all of us on here get monitored. We get audited for every little thing. We do we get scrutinized. The other the lastly, it's heavy, heavy communication with an employer. And for us, it's heavy communication with our locals because we pass this information through all of our how means job centers.

So, where are we at? How are we doing? Well, we started walking down this path. About four and a half years ago, and I'm going to be honest with you. It took me almost a year and a few months just to feel confident enough to have very real conversations with employers. I struggled with it. I would have some conversations, they would ask me questions and I would realize I was saying, well, I don't know, let me find out.

I was saying that a lot. And so we backed it down and I really needed to get my feet under me. So. Now that we've been in this thing a little bit, we've served 74 apprentices. I love to say the serve number, because if you tell the number that's active, it doesn't tell the whole story. Right? So we have 31 that have completed.

We are going to get far more into that over the next couple of months. We've got lots of completers coming up, which is amazing because that gives them an industry recognized credential. So, we've got about 42 that are active. Those are spread over 14 different employers. As you can see on the slide, there's our 7 occupations.

1 of them that we just got added as a peer support specialist. And it's interesting because that's our 1st, non manufacturing. 1 of the myths about apprenticeship is. You can only do manufacturing, right? You can only do production, right? We are walking down this path of peer support specialists. Those are for we're using them with a drug and alcohol clinic.

We're hoping to expand that into our job and family service model. So we're, we're making some moves outside of manufacturing. So, and if you want to hit that next slide for us, that'd be great. So, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. I do like to show people data and I like to show them some data of.

Okay. What's going on? And what you're seeing here is really the labor rate, labor force participation rate and how it drops. And remember these drops every percentage point equals about 1. 7 million workers. So, if you go back, you can see, even in early 2000s. We've dropped off. And the reason this data ends when it does is we don't have new bureau labor statistics data that we're working with.

We're hoping to have that very soon. Actually, in our partnership with light cast, we're working on getting new data. So we're hoping to have that. You can see a pretty large drop off and if you can hit that next 1 for us, I think it's even better. So here's your demographics. You're 18 to 24. you're 18 to 19.

you're 20 to 24. so where are the workers going to come from? Right? Right. Where is it going to happen? We have a huge population of viable bodies that are neither working nor in school. So, with that said, what do you do next? If you're an employer, if you're working with employers in the community, if you're working in the community to figure out how to get individuals employed or how to retain that employment.

And if you want to go ahead, the next 1, our thought process was. Apprenticeships, right? Apprenticeships is a sign of if it's rising, then it's a sign of tight markets. You can't go out and get the talent you want. You got to build it. Right? And so what we turn to do is help people build an apprenticeship model that made sense for their business that allows them to be successful.

And, oh, by the way, it takes a lot of that red tape off of the business. And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit. So Some of the things we have on here. There's lots of myths of apprenticeships. And honestly, I would like to take if we could about 15 or 20 seconds. And if people can throw in the chat, what, what you think of apprenticeships, meaning what, what is something common that about how long they are or how long they take or what occupations, anybody want to throw something in there?

I know we had some experts out there, so throw some into the chat for us about, about your, your view of apprenticeships. I'll and I'm gonna get quiet and wait on you. I'm gonna make you put something in there. It'll be long pauses  

[00:13:22] Max Schelkopf: And I'll tell you, while we're waiting on that, what my first thought is, Rocky, when I think of apprentice, right?

One, I, I just think of my friend group that went through it, right? My, my buddies, I grew up, and they're all in a labor, whether they're a steam fitter, or whether they're, you know, My little brother, he's in he went through his diesel mechanic apprenticeship, you know, 3, 4, 5 years long, some of them, right?

I mean, that's what the 1st thought I come to mind is, is those union based opportunities that, you know, they, they work very hard when they're young for 3, 4, 5 years, however long it is. And I can see some of the people in the group here. Let's see.  

[00:14:08] Rocky Rockhold: I love some of our responses. Roger. Yes, sir. And while you learn huge component of it, well done will participants be committed to the program?

We're going to talk about that. It's a great 1 that came from Dave. Thank you. Dave too much data hours to track. Oh, thanks. Jeff man. You couldn't have said that any better. Definitely the gym workers learn what they want them and develop trust while getting paid. Absolutely. Absolutely.  

[00:14:35] Max Schelkopf: And it's got her question of what defines an apprenticeship as well.

[00:14:38] Rocky Rockhold: That's probably a good place to start for sure. Great place to start. And I love that. She asked, is it different than an internship? Yes, and not only is it different than an internship, it's different way different than a pre apprenticeship and I tend to stay away from the pre apprenticeship conversations.

And here's why pre apprenticeship has been this catchphrase, right? It's been the, it's been the shiny nickel for a couple of years now, but folks have not put the time and effort into the pre apprenticeship the way they need to, because they haven't developed established registered apprentices. And you can't have a pre apprenticeship without an established registered apprenticeship.

And so that's where folks fall off the map and they ultimately end up doing what is called an internship or simply work experience. Right? Because it's not registered. So great comments. I appreciate it for all of those on here. An apprenticeship is. In theory, very simple, and this is why it's been around literally since the Egyptian times.

At the end of the day, it is an earn while you learn. There are 2 components. 1 component is on the job training. So, you get paid. While you're working quote, working while learning while being trained, and you're getting trained on things that are not exclusive necessarily to that employer, but that are more inclusive of the entire occupation that you're learning the 2nd piece to that is you have a requirement of related classroom instruction.

So, you're not just learning. In the, the employer's environment, you're also doing related classroom instruction to give you a more global view of how these things work. And of what works for you to answer Max's statement or respond to Max's statement is definitely not just union shops. And I know someone put in the, the comments.

About that it is not it's diverse. You can, you can do an apprenticeship and darn near anything. I'm working with multiple groups now that are trying to do apprenticeships for paramedics and we're trying to do health care apprenticeships. We've got another group that is doing, looking at doing apprenticeships for teachers, and that brings on a whole extra piece of the related classroom instruction, because I didn't they used to have to have your degree, but you can.

So, making an apprenticeship occupation, you can make it viable and and to answer 1 of the statements that were in there about folks staying and being committed. You'll see once we have trained employees, 91 percent of those that we sponsor remain with the same employer. I don't know if there are any folks on here, but if there are, and we told you that your retention rate would be 91%.

Everyone would sign up for it. Every H. R. professional in the world would take 91 percent retention.  

[00:17:31] Max Schelkopf: What do you think the driving factor is on that on that super high retention?  

[00:17:36] Rocky Rockhold: I think it's a couple of things. Number 1, I don't think we have our data to back it. But number 1, it's, it's showing a commitment to the individual because apprentice does take a commitment from the employer.

And it does take a commitment to say, hey, we're investing in you. So the employer's investing in in that employee and that's apprentice. And so we know that's part of the reason. 2nd piece is the obvious. You get paid more, right? Part of an apprenticeship model is you have to, you have to get pay increases from the employer.

You don't, you don't come in at X number of dollars and stay there. You have to raise their level of pay as they're going through the apprenticeship. So, in, in terms of what you're getting paid, it's guaranteed raises as long as you're doing what you need to do as the apprentice. Right? So, I think that's the biggest reason for us, the 3rd, and probably.

As powerful piece to that is. We provide them with a support system, right? So we're running this through our America's job center. Our Ohio means job center. So, because we're running it through those, those job centers, we're providing that candidate support as well. So, it's not all just business designed, which I think makes a difference, right?

If I'm at work, and I'm struggling with this apprenticeship. And I've got a phone number to call or an email to sense with someone who supports me, but they, they don't work with me. So I'm not going to get in trouble for voicing my opinion.  

[00:19:05] Max Schelkopf: Yeah,  

[00:19:06] Rocky Rockhold: the support system is there, so it makes a difference, right?

[00:19:09] Max Schelkopf: Higher level of transparency to, I mean, that's huge. I feel, you know, you know. What the expectations are, you know, what the steps are, you know, how you're going to get there, you know, what pay you're going to get at X, Y, and Z that that heightened level of transparency of the program. I feel like to me personally, that would mean the world, you know, I mean, you know what you need to do, you know, when you need to do it and you know what you're going to get those, those pieces are huge, you know but I see bonus for employers  

[00:19:38] Rocky Rockhold: max is that we found Some employers, not some more employers than we like to admit they do.

They do a higher and hope, right? They hire you and they hope you catch on. They hope that it becomes knowledge base that you keep. They don't have a real training plan and so they set you over on the line with Johnny who's been there for 50 years thinking that Johnny's going to pass all that knowledge down when really Johnny's just doing his job.

[00:20:05] Max Schelkopf: Right? He's just great. So  

[00:20:06] Rocky Rockhold: aligning them with an actual mentor on the job, which require is requirement of an apprenticeship makes a difference  

[00:20:13] Max Schelkopf: for sure.  

[00:20:14] Rocky Rockhold: So you're no longer hiring and hoping you're, you're hiring and you have a plan. You're training.  

[00:20:20] Max Schelkopf: What is a typical, I mean, my, my biggest question with it is, is the length and I might be jumping ahead.

I mean, but I. That's always kind of the driving thing with me is I would hear I personally did an internship, you know, which is totally different. But that was a year versus my friends and the apprenticeships that we're getting paid. And they were there for 5 years. You know, the, the link is always a huge question component in my mind, you know.

[00:20:46] Rocky Rockhold: Yep, so I love that. You brought that up Max. 1 of the things that I struggled with early was the length. I'm like, gosh, apprenticeships are so long and and if you hit to the next slide for me, I believe we, we talk a little bit about a little bit about that. Yep. So, 1 of the things, and this is off slide. So, if you guys are looking at the side, but 1 of the things that we, we push upon our folks, especially our employers is there's more than 1 way to run an apprenticeship.

And I didn't know that coming in. I thought all apprenticeships were time based. I thought it took 4 years. And once you were in, you were in, and you were, you were locked in and there was no way around it. What I've learned since is there's multiple ways to set up these apprenticeships. So, number 1 is the old school time based.

You can absolutely do a time based. You can say I'm going to trade you hour for hour of your apprenticeship, and that's how we're going to get this done. Most occupations do leave you closer to that 4 year period on a time based. The other piece you can do is what we call a competency based. So, no matter what, you're required to spend a minimum of 2000 hours on the job training.

No matter what, however, you can also offset hours by using a competency based, having your employer say, hey, Max is competent in this. We thought it would take him 50 hours to be competent, but he did it in 20 or moving on to the next stage of our on the job training. Right? So, you can, you can speed it up  

[00:22:17] Max Schelkopf: just by inferring skill level based upon what they're doing.

How's that? How's that structured?  

[00:22:24] Rocky Rockhold: Yeah. So what we have done is we help our employers set up their actual on the job training plan. And within that plan, we always set it up with hours. Now, when we do a hybrid or a competency base, and I haven't explained hybrid yet, so I will, but when we do a hybrid or a competency plate base, we give range of hours.

So we know it's going to take max between 25 and 125 hours to learn this. He's got to do the 25 minimum because I know as an employer, you can't learn it in less than that. Right, but you don't have to do the 1 25. So it's already the hourly time and the plan is predetermined for you. If it's competency based, how quickly you get done with that is is on you.

The the apprentice, right? So, it really is, and it allows for a more individualized training. So, if they hire, if they, if we, if an employer hires Rocky and Max at the same time, and Max is more advanced than me, he can move on in his apprenticeship and I don't drag him down. Right. I'm just going to make sure I finish what I need to finish.

And so it does become. Definitely a gateway to moving folks forward quicker. The hybrid model is just what you would think it is. It's a combination of the time based and the competency based. So, you glue them together and you come up with the employee that you want, they'll do minimum numbers of hours for you or maximum number, depending on what you want as an employer, and then you can competency based some of those things or all of them, depending on how it plays out.

It's not as long as you think it is, right? It's just not. And you can design it in a way that makes sense. So, for those of you who are on here, and you're not an employer that wants to do an apprenticeship, but you think, hey, a, how do I get people into apprenticeships? And B, what if I wanted to sponsor an apprenticeship?

Anyone can be a 3rd party sponsor. Basically, you become a group sponsor and that's what we do at our board level. We, I showed you those occupations that we sponsor earlier. So we can work with any of our groups and fit folks into those occupations. The beauty of that is, as the sponsor, We become the bearer of the paperwork.

So the employer no longer has an excuse of, wow, that's a lot of paperwork. It's a heavy lift. That's off of them. We work in coordination with the employer to develop the training plan and the rates, the hourly rates. But once we've done that, we take it from there. We're the approval mechanism to move it forward to Department of labor.

The other piece to that is when the monitoring comes and, as, you know, it will come. When the auditor comes, they will come. They come to us as the third party sponsor. They don't go to the employer. They're not knocking on their door. They're not sending information to the employer. They're coming to us and we provide that information.

So, it really does remove a lot of the red tape and the burden of the heavy apprenticeship lift from the employer last, but not least the reason we love it. And if I'm going too fast, or people have questions, type them in, I'm trying to pay attention to the chat as I'm talking, but, man, I can really get going on this thing.

So, Sarah has way to take less time. Previous work experience training offset the 2000. Absolutely. Absolutely so incumbent workers can come many of our apprenticeships are with incumbent workers. So, Sarah, you said that's so so well, well done. If you guys are reading the, the chats, you can again competency based that previous work history, you can competency based that previous work knowledge.

You can even. Bring in transcripts if they've taken classes that equal the classes of their related classroom instruction. So you can do all of those things to again, shorten the timeframe. And that's always something people want to talk about is apprenticeships are so long. They're only long if you create them that way.

Right? And they're only long if you, as the employer are stuck in this mode of, this is how we're going to do it and nothing else. So, thank you Sarah. That was awesome. You should have been the 1 speaking today. I think you've got it covered.  

[00:26:25] Max Schelkopf: The 1 thing to rock is the employment component. So when you and I were kind of discussing this, I and I'm somewhat embarrassed, but not really, because I feel like apprenticeship is often overlooked is is a key.

Part of employment, right? And I didn't realize and again, I, my personal experience was through an internship. So it was a little bit different view, but I guess I never really put together that apprenticeship. Was still considered full employment, you know, I mean that that struck me and I looking back and reflecting, of course, my friends that were going through, they were working, but it always triggered more of an education standpoint than an employment standpoint in my brain, you know, so that was something that was surprising to me to, you know,  

[00:27:11] Rocky Rockhold: Well said Max.

So just remember the 1st day an apprentice starts, they're an employee. You can't be an apprentice if you're not employed. And so you're an employee. And yes, you're doing classwork. You're doing those things, but you're an employee. And so, by all standards, you're part of those same benefits that employees get at those companies for us in the workforce world that use federal dollars, such as we owe it dollars.

We need that employment, right? We, we, we need to take credit for that employment. And so, again, this was just a natural progression of us being a sponsorship. Apprentices check all of those we owe a performance boxes that we look at, right? It's employment. Isn't that why we train people? We train them for employment, right?

It's also not just employment. We're training them for a career now. We're not just training them to hold the fort down. We're training them to expand their knowledge and have an actual career retention. I already shared with you. 91 percent of our apprentices retain their employment after they're after they're done.

So they become journey folks, journey persons. They retain that employment. Do people leave business? Of course they do. Right? Of course they do. If, if you and I were offered more money to go somewhere else, and it was a good fit for us, would we walk away? Well, I think we would, right? We're, we're, we're also in our heads trying to do better for ourselves and our families.

So, yes, people leave, but as you can see, the percentages say, they stay right earnings for. So, for us, and this dollar amount is just here in our area. So I want to be cautious. I don't want anyone to think this is a federal dollar amount or a national dollar amount. But our apprentices average wage to start out as 18 an hour.

And remember, there's mandatory wage increases within those apprenticeships. So, not only are they advancing in skills and knowledge, they're advancing dollar wise, all right, credential attainment. Those of us in the world or the workforce world, we know we have got to attain a credential. If I'm helping you, if I'm training or paying, you've got to attain a credential.

That's exactly what an apprenticeship is. It's, it's a nationally recognized credential, industry recognized credential. So it checks all the boxes. 1 of the main ways we've been successful, and I'm surprised this hasn't come up in the chat yet. People will ask. Well, who pays for it? Right? Somebody's paying for this stuff.

You're right. They are. And so what we try to do is what we try to do our best as we use our incumbent worker training to train those apprentices or to help offset the cost of those apprentices. Right so we use incumbent worker training. We have a big push on incumbent worker training in our area. And so we use those dollars to offset.

If it's a new hire, then we look at our, we owe on the job training funds that allows us to offset the cost of training that individual. Right? So that's how the, the, we owe a dollars play a role with apprentices. Now, what we've done locally and I want to be make sure everyone's clear on this, that this is something we have the ability to do locally.

We moved essentially the finish line when it comes to how much we can pay and how long we can pay for an apprentice in our policies. So, if you're in a registered apprenticeship program, I can fund you at a higher rate than I can fund an individual training account. I can hang on to you longer than that two years that an individual training account asked for.

So we've, we've done that within our policies to expand the basis of how we help employers and how we help customers become apprentices and become successful in that industry recognized credential. I feel like I just threw a lot out, so I'm going to pause see Max. If you have any questions, or I don't see anything else in the chat, but I'm happy to answer questions.

[00:30:55] Max Schelkopf: I can't imagine that this isn't just groundbreaking for a ton of communities. Right? I mean. It just makes sense that every single employer, if workforce boards get it established, where the board is taking the bear of the brunt of far as far as managing. 'cause several of the, the comments in the chat, right?

It's, it's a large burden from a data management, the paperwork management, all of those components, right? That is a big burden to bear for the employer and you're lifting that off of them. So this makes so much sense to me. Just from not only an employer standpoint, but being available as a resource to the public.

I mean, it's a no brainer. I think it's very impressive. What what you've done to kind of become the provider and things like that. And I'm really excited to see what these maybe we'll do a follow up webinar years. Based upon this to see how much that program has grown to, you know, I would love to see that as well.

[00:31:58] Rocky Rockhold: In, in 1 of them, I need to bring Sarah from Lake County on on that her and I might have to bring Sarah tag team that I feel like she's got a great grasp of it.  

[00:32:05] Max Schelkopf: Yeah, in, danielle in there as well, might not have diverse areas, mostly blue collar occupations. That's the piece that I think is. Really interesting to you.

You discussed that you were kind of starting the preliminary process of a teacher, apprentice and things like that. So can you elaborate a little bit more on, is this something that is solely going to be for these blue collar, the machinists, the things like that? You know, what is, where do you draw the line between blue collar, white collar, those kinds of things like that?

Cause I think that's always an important stigma to break as well with this kind of thing, you know? So.  

[00:32:43] Rocky Rockhold: That's well said and and I think it was Danielle who put that in the, in the chat. So 1 of the things that we did, we absolutely were. Intentional on making it manufacturing when we started down this path, there was, there was no question about it.

We were targeting manufacturers. A big reason for us to do that is we had several major and I do mean, major global companies that were coming to our areas and they were all in manufacturing. And so we were really trying to get ahead of the curve and make sure that we supported the manufacturers who were already in those communities.

Right? Because we know the minute. A large employer comes in. The 1st thing they do is they pay 10 cents an hour more. Everyone bails. They go over there because they think it's going to be great. So, what we wanted to do was build up those community employers before that happened. So, our intent was 100 percent manufacturing to start.

However. We have moved down a path, getting our peer support specialist approved by Department of Labor. That's the only 1 in the state of Ohio. That's been approved as a peer support specialist. So we're already walking that path. We've got several others in the pipeline and 1 of the things that. That I love is that there's no limits to this thing.

If you, if you want to establish an apprenticeship, if you want to build knowledge and skill base internally at your employment, we can figure out how to make it apprenticeable. And so, you know, we want to make sure that that it has diversity to it, both with occupations, employers and customers. So, 1 of the things we put in our standards packet that we communicate to all of our employers.

And it seems to be, it was a small thing to us, but it's seemingly been a big deal as I've given presentations nationally. We put in that standards packet that you're going to work with our local how means job center. And now we don't specifically identify what that looks like. But what we do talk about is you're going to recruit through our, you're going to do job postings through our.

We're going to become a partnership. We're going to become a real team in this process for you. And I think the other piece that that's that's done, and we didn't know it would do this, but it has created more diversity for us with types of occupations, because folks who were already using our, our, our job centers, our 1 stop centers are saying, well, hey, I see you do apprenticeships.

Can you talk to us about that? So that that's where we're really moving the needle on getting this out of just being blue collar jobs. Fascinating.  

[00:35:13] Max Schelkopf: I love  

[00:35:14] Rocky Rockhold: that.  

[00:35:15] Max Schelkopf: All right. Are there any other questions for, for Rocky or myself? If there are, throw them in that chat, and if there isn't any other little last touch points for you, Rocky, I'll do a quick little blurb on how engaged by cell can potentially fit in, and then we'll have a couple of minutes there for any last questions we got.

But Anna, last slide. All right. So Fantastic, Rocky. Thank you very, very, very much. That was hyper informative, very well said, very insightful. And I think just to wrap it up, how can Engage by Cell potentially fit into this as well? So, right, we facilitate any workforce development needs pretty simply, right?

So, the two main problems that we help overcome is engagement, right? And two, information accessibility. So, kind of going along with Rocky, All of these folks that are interested in apprenticeships or need to be communicated with during these internship or apprenticeships, sorry we lead that charge by text messaging, right?

So how do you connect with these folks? Let's be real, if they're a youth demographic, young starting out in their career, or even older demographics now, they're not picking up the phone when they call. They've vetted out, they're not going to listen to your voicemail. So we lead that charge with a really intuitive text messaging platform.

And then mobile web apps are the information component. I'll go into some details here real quickly. Go ahead, Anna. So texting, pretty straightforward. The kind of key component that differentiates engaged by cells than others is the ability to mass communicate. So push out a couple clicks of a button, push out 1000 text messages.

Hey, apprenticeship program starting things of that kind of nature. Look at click this link to view all the different opportunities or learn more, etc. And we've really tried to kind of peel back a couple different layers as well with inbound for mass communication. So imagine creating a call to action for your apprenticeship programs or your jobs or careers or education or training or whatever it is.

We've all seen those signs before where it says text jobs to XYZ, whatever number it is, and they will automatically get the information that they need. And also simultaneously, you'll be building a database you can communicate with. And the final little key component with the text messaging provided by Engage by Cell is the one on one component.

So, Rocky and his programs have all these people in apprenticeships or as many of the people on the call. You have a lot of people involved in your programs, whether they're seeking career, training, education, whatever it might be. And you need to have those long format, one on one engagement conversations with them to get them the resources they need.

You can easily do that through our platform. So. And then the last slide for me, pretty please Anna, mobile web apps. We've all downloaded, I think, statistically about 60 to 70 apps on our phone. And there's something going on with native apps, right? So that's kind of the main difference I want to cover with the mobile web apps.

We all have a bunch of native apps on our phone, okay? And then mobile web apps are a little bit different. They still have the functionality. So they have the look, feel, action of a native app that you'd hard download, but they're all web based. So there is no hard download required. Okay. So that's the big component.

The challenge nowadays is getting people to hard download things to their devices. We streamline that process by pairing it really well with our texting. So as you can imagine, push out a text, they click the link, up pops a mobile web app that can have all the different components of engagement you need, whether it's text, image, poll, survey, fillable forms.

video, audio, etc. So they have that 24 7, 365 access to all the different resources they need throughout any of your processes. And we'll wrap it up here with any additional little questions. And there is my contact information and Rocky's contact information. And I did want to leave it open for any last minute questions anybody has.

I see, do we have them in all states? Yes. Um, Rocky, is there Danielle from Romer asked, do we have them in all states? I'm assuming there's apprenticeship programs. I mean, we owe as federal funding that can be allocated, you know, so that's going to be.  

[00:39:37] Rocky Rockhold: Yeah, so, so Danielle, they're, they're called America's job centers and they are in all states.

Some of them are run by essentially 1 organization across regions of the state. So, you have my contact information. If you want to shoot me an email, if I need to help align you with with that, I'm happy to do that or anything else. But yeah, all of this is available. across the country.  

[00:40:01] Max Schelkopf: Absolutely. And again, thank you, Rocky.

This was a fantastic presentation. I feel much thoroughly more informed on apprenticeships and the difference and all the ins and outs and how you can fund them, start them, what you do with them. And I think you did a great job and I appreciate your time very, very much, sir. And I appreciate everybody who joined and participated.

This was a great chat. Everybody was definitely pitching in and asking questions, and we love to see that. And again, if anybody has any questions, please feel free to reach out to Rocky or myself, and we can definitely do our best to point you in the right directions and get Get you whatever information we can.

So everybody have a great day. And just so you know, this was recorded and we will distribute it via email. So if you came in late or would like to share it with any of your colleagues, we'll get that provided over to you as soon as possible. Probably by the end of the day, but have a great day.

Great week. Everyone. Thank you for joining. Thank you. Rocky again for your time.

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