New Apprenticeship program beginning in Denver

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Started in the summer of 2016, Mikron’s apprenticeships are now a part of CareerWise. The Colorado initiative, officially launching this month, will place 116 high school juniors in state- and industry-sponsored apprenticeship programs. CareerWise will train students like Burnett in professional fields such as IT, advanced manufacturing, business operations, and financial services while they simultaneously earn their high school diplomas and college credit. (Students are also paid for the hours they work, typically between $10 and $14 an hour.) At the end of the three-year CareerWise program, students can finish earning a four-year degree—in some cases paid for by the companies that have been training them—or walk into a job that pays a middle-class wage (at least $35,000).

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Mikron isn’t an exceptionally benevolent business. The Swiss outfit is one of 40 companies in Colorado that have signed up to train apprentices because they view the program as a solution to Colorado’s current workforce problem: There’s not enough local talent to be able to hire and retain good employees. “It’s pure business,” says Phil Kalin, president and CEO of Pinnacol Assurance, a workers’ compensation insurance firm that will host 25 apprentices this fall. “We hear time and time again that Colorado doesn’t have a pipeline of talented people. This is very much positioned so that there’s a small up-front cost for training, but by the time they get to the end of that training, they’re spun up and you get some real benefit.”

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When Swiss students finish ninth grade, they have an important decision to make. They can continue on an academic path toward a degree and a career in a field such as medicine or law. Or they can opt for a vocational path in which they’ll train in several industries over four years, eventually leaving with applicable skills and certificates that ensure they can attain well-paying jobs in everything from banking to computer programming. Seventy percent of students choose the vocational path. As a result, the country’s youth (15- to 24-year-olds) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent—the lowest in Europe and almost three percent lower than the U.S. rate. “They’re doing it right,” says Dr. Kim Hunter Reed, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

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