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For the last three years, Osceola County has offered apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships in medical assisting and construction.
It’s called the 2030 skills gap: by the year 2030, studies show that the manufacturing skills gap in the United States could result in 2.1 million unfulfilled jobs.
The most significant cause? “We stopped teaching students trades and started sending them to college. Now all the senior tradespeople are retiring and there’s no one to fill their gap,” said Tim Burdette, Executive Director of Career and Technical Education for Osceola County Schools.
That is a challenge the Osceola County School District is facing head-on. For the last three years, Osceola County has offered apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships in medical assisting and construction.
“Take a construction company, for instance,” Burdette said. “They have employees they want to train. We do the classroom training, which is 144 hours of classroom training two nights a week, then they do paid daily on-the-job training for 2,000 hours.”
The employee is trained according to the employer specifications, which benefits both the employee and the employer.
“It’s a much better model, because statistics show that if you train them, they’ll stay with you,” he said.
And the apprenticeship program is free to the student.
“The students don’t pay a cent,” said Rob Moody, Resource Specialist for Career and Technical Education. “The companies pay for everything. You get a participating employer that sponsors their employee to do it The cost to the employer is only $500-$600 a year.
“In our first construction apprenticeship, those guys went right up into management before they were finished. They went from zero to hero. They went from zero to already running a crew to, ‘you’re a superintendent on a job site,’” he said.
According to Burdette, tradespeople currently make more money than college graduates, and they have no debt.
“The trades are needed. And the trades are being paid. There are more technical and trades jobs out there than there are people in them,” he said. “We are working with a different generation of student. The purpose of making it more flexible—hybrid, etc.—is because students are different.
“They don’t come and stay focused in class. We need to make it work for them to come to the business. The student we have now is not the student we had 40 years ago. We have to try to connect with them.”
Osceola County offers carpentry apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship, construction craftworker, medical assisting apprenticeship, and will soon begin offering diesel mechanic apprenticeships. The apprenticeship program is actively seeking both apprentices and sponsoring employers. The preapprenticeship programs are open to ages 17 and up, and the apprenticeships are open to ages 18 and up. For more information, call Tim Burdette at 407-518-4580, ext. 65466, or Rob Moody at 407-518-4580, ext. 15898.
