Mark Sylvester:

The Hello Careers Podcast explores a system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our inside to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age-old way of learning a skill, apprenticeship. We’ll address issues such as where there’s a skill’s gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community? If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program or are curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your host, Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.

 

Well, welcome to the show. I’m thrilled to introduce Michael Specchierla and Dan Weeks, and you guys are going to take us on journey. Michael just tell us, introduce yourself to the audience and what brings you to the table today.

 

Michael Specchierla:

I’m Michael Specchierla. I’m the Director of Career and College Pathways in San Luis Obispo working for the county Office of Education, and then I’m also the Executive Director of SLO Partners, which is a consortium of local school districts, the community college, Cal Pal University as well as workforce development board and a number of businesses. We’re really trying to align the education and training pipeline with what the business needs are.

 

Mark Sylvester:

And Dan.

 

Dan Weeks:

So Dan Weeks. My background is in tech firms. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m the entrepreneur in residence for Cal Poly’s new business incubator, and I work for the county office of education in programs to enable people to get jobs in tech without having to get a four year degree in tech.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So it’s interesting. We’ve got a leading educator and a leading business guy, entrepreneur and why are you both at the table? Why is that so important to this project?

 

Michael Specchierla:

Well, a lot of new programs are initiated in education through grants, and if you only look at grant as one-time money, you’re only going to get it at a one-time shot in the arm. So you really need to look at it as education startup funding, and so that’s where my relationship with Dan Weeks has come in, that as an entrepreneur he’s helping to guide these investments where they aren’t’ just one time investments but they’re sustainable. They really create value out of those investments in the public.

 

Mark Sylvester:

How long has SLO Partners been around?

 

Michael Specchierla:

SLO Partners is in year three. It was started through a grant called the California Career Pathways Trust Grant. Daryl Steinberg, before he left office at the depths of the recession, initiated a grant by the legislature to really align workforce development boards, community colleges, K-12 school districts, and business to really be able to work together regionally through consortiums to align education and training with business. This really came out of the depths of the recession where whole industries and sectors were wiped out and there was no real way to retrain, retool for new and emerging markets.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So it must feel particularly gratifying to you right now to see the seed that you planted three years ago now show up in this show and the purpose of this show is to teach other groups around the country how to do what you have done. You’ve blazed this trail, kind of a Sherpa. You’ll be the Sherpa for us in these episodes to help others who want to do what you’ve done. So why don’t you tell us a little bit more broader context what this concept is about and how we’re going to spend our next eight shows together.

 

Michael Specchierla:

Well, at it’s heart, this is about using apprenticeship combined with entrepreneurialism so that both employers and employees really benefit from that relationship. You get better business intelligence for emerging sectors where there’s labor and skill gaps by combining an apprenticeship model where it’s learn and earn. It’s not just vocational training but it actually has a work experience component to it, along with building a relationship with a business so that you stay better informed about what are the emerging skills and knowledge that are needed in these up and coming markets.

 

Mark Sylvester:

And we’re going to get into … I love the word that you said, emerging skills, because it feels like so many industries are being transformed right now, and the workforce needs are really changing right now. I think it’s … we should also say where we are right now. We’re in a high school that has got a state-of-the-art audio facility that was fueled with some of these funds. Is that right?

 

Michael Specchierla:

Yeah, this is one of the investments that the California Career Pathways Trust Grant, as well as the Career Technical Education Incentive Grant, was able to make possible. These students actually helped install the floor, the sound proofing. They’re learning how to use all the equipment, the audio production equipment. That’s a really important communication skill I think any student growing up can apply to any sector that they think they’d like to go into.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Yeah, absolutely. So what we’re going to do is over the next eight shows, so we want someone to start with this one and then read, because we’ve got a narrative we’ve built into that, we’re going to teach them exactly how to put in one of these programs, how to build it, how you build partnerships, what kind of outcomes you would want, what the value of this is because as you’re trying to build community support for what you’re doing you have to understand the value to the community, the value to the business, the value to the workforce, the value to the schools. There’s a big value conversation that has to happen. A realistic outcome conversation, like what are the things we can expect to have in what periods of time? I like the way you said it’s this one-time money that we’ve got to make last. So what we’re doing is we’re building, we’re helping create an ecosystem where careers are launched, right?

 

Michael Specchierla:

Definitely. You make an investment, you want to have created value out of that.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So we know what the show is about because this is really going to be a lot of nuts and bolts, right? We’re just how we do that and listener know that back on the website, on the Hello Careers website, we’ll have guides. There’ll be material with things that you can download that are going to help you through all of this, but we’ll start with this conversation for sure. So Dan, who should be listening to the show?

 

Dan Weeks:

I think our ideal audience is anyone who really wants to build a career pipeline for local employers. I think there’s a large number of employers who have openings and can’t find people who are qualified, both from their soft skills and their hard skills, for the openings. Really what we do with apprenticeship is we work on both. We screen for attitude to get the soft skills, and then we train for aptitude. We do that typically through industry-standard certifications.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So in talking to you guys and trying to unpack all of this, a key part of this was the certification bit, wasn’t it? So we’re going to get into depth in how that works and the kind of partnerships you need to make, to get that piece.

 

Dan Weeks:

I think the key for certifications is certifications are automatically updated as the market changes and new certifications become relevant to employers on an on-going basis. The reason we need this entrepreneurial mindset here is a year from now we might have our first group in a new area that two years ago wasn’t even a hot area. It’s a moving target, but with apprenticeship you don’t need to wait for an academic senate to approve a new major. It’s very closely tied to these are orders we have from local employers. How do we provide relevant curriculum on very short notice that directly addresses the employer’s needs?

 

Michael Specchierla:

And I think when you talk about certifications, there can be a paper certification or a national or international certification, but there can also be a local certification in that a group of employers, or even one employer, have said, “This is what really are the skills and training we need and we certify that this is legit.” So there’s a lot of different flavors of what certification can look like, local, regional, nation.

 

Mark Sylvester:

And that happens pretty quickly too. It’s not a two-years to get this. It’s 12 weeks, 14 weeks in some cases.

 

Michael Specchierla:

It depends on where you’re entering into that job set.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So I love the immediacy of this. This is not a long-term thing. It’s like we can figure this out quickly.

 

Dan Weeks:

I think the way I look at is you don’t want to be a factory that once the factory is up to speed it keeps putting out the same output independent of orders. What we really want to be is a factory that ramps up almost like a popup university based on employer requirements and then we look at for our next cohort where’s the highest need? But we don’t have a fixed infrastructure that’s required to say, “Now that we’ve invested in this curriculum we need to keep doing it for 10 years.”

 

Mark Sylvester:

I’m going to keep that picture of popup university in my mind. That’s a real good one. Thank you for that because it’s responsive to as things are changing.

 

Dan Weeks:

Yeah, it’s all about the employers. It’s not about anything other than the employer saying, “I’ve got a career path. Can you get me people that would be a great fit for this career.”

 

Mark Sylvester:

So the person who’s listening to the show is someone who has gotten a grant already to do this and now they’re looking to this show to help figure out how to navigate, or someone who’s thinking about getting a grant. They may have heard about this show at a conference and said, “Oh, that sounds like exactly what we need to do. How do we go into that?” So we’ll talk about that as well and who else should be listening to this show?

 

Dan Weeks:

I think people from workforce development boards who are doing work with businesses, whether it be rapid recovery work or job developers that are trying to build relationships with their business community, people at community colleges, people at universities, people in high school who are trying to develop pathways and pipelines that are responsive to their local communities.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Career counselors?

 

Dan Weeks:

Yes, career counselors. They’re very important in helping to steer students towards good opportunities and get them exposure to things they may not be aware of.

 

Mark Sylvester:

And the reason I ask that is listener if you’re looking around to the people you work with, think about those in your ecosystem that have any of those job titles and tell them about the show. Right? So they can start listening and you could start building your own cohort of co-conspirators is you will to implement one of these programs. Now Michael, when we first talked you were telling me about how you studied other systems, other people who had done this. As we know, success leaves clues, and you told me a story about Switzerland and one about South Carolina. Why don’t you tell our listener about that.

 

Michael Specchierla:

So I’ve been a career technical education teacher for many years. I’ve taught computer science. I’ve taught digital media. I’ve also been an English, history and library science teacher so I’ve always wanted to make sure that whatever we’re teaching in a classroom has context and a relationship to the community. So I’ve always been open to having business people and other professionals really help guide the curriculum in my classroom, and with career technical education pathways you’re required to have an advisory board to help influence your curriculum. Those are really dependent upon what kind of relationships you can build between your teachers, students, and the business.

 

It’s a hard ask of a business to be part of an advisory committee because they’re not really getting anything immediate out of that relationship. So often, we sort of joke that it’s a milk and cookies kind of a conversation. The business comes. You show them your curriculum. You show them a project. They have a cookie. They tell you it’s nice, the cookie’s nice, your curriculum’s nice, and we meet again in maybe a year or maybe in six months.

 

So apprenticeship offered a totally different opportunity for the business because now there’s something actually in it for them, that they have influence over the curriculum and they’re going to get an employee out of it. So there was a job a stake and there’s an employee that has a prospect. In looking at a couple of different models, South Carolina has done a great job of doing a whole statewide initiative in apprenticeship and when I talk to my counterparts in South Carolina I said, “So, does the apprenticeship model go further than the advisory model?” Universally, all of them said, “Oh yes. The businesses now are really at the table.” They realize there’s a return on investment for them and realize it’s worth their time to be spending time with you to develop these apprenticeships. Really, I’ve gotten over the past year and half working with apprenticeship, I’ve gotten more business intelligence about what exactly are the skills needed to be successful in various industries than I had over 20 as a teacher in gauging businesses.

 

Mark Sylvester:

That’s unexpected I guess. You were surprised by that.

 

Michael Specchierla:

I didn’t know how effective it would be. When somebody says, “Oh yeah it’s really good. Businesses are at the table,” you go, “Okay. That’s worth a shot.” But just the amount of information that we’ve been able to get out of employers, their willingness to talk to us about really what are the skills … because it used to be we’d hear, “Oh, they need strong soft skills. Yeah, a little bit of job description would be great to have, or they should know a little bit about digital.” Very cursory, nothing in depth really of what would really be the skills needed, nothing to the degree of what we found out through our apprenticeship model.

 

Mark Sylvester:

How is Switzerland the same or different?

 

Michael Specchierla:

Switzerland is even more advanced. Over the last 10 years they’ve really made a lot of changes in how they run apprenticeship and the results of that have been just very impressive. They have one of the lowest rates of youth unemployment in the world and their businesses, over 40% of the businesses in Switzerland participate in some type of an apprenticeship.

 

Mark Sylvester:

40%

 

Michael Specchierla:

Yes, and it’s a great relationship between the government who issue the curriculum and the business, which offer the work-base learning, and the students who have multiple entries and exits into vocational education or baccalaureate education starting at age 14. You see just the majority of the students or excuse me the majority of the management actually come up through the vocational education training rather than just the baccalaureate training.

 

There’s a ratio that a lot of economists have thrown out there that it’s you need one higher education degree, like a PhD or a Masters to ever two bachelor’s degree, but then you need about seven technical degrees, which could be associates degrees. That’s really what the ratio that the labor market has been for the last 50 years and they think will still be the relationship, that ratio, for the next 50 years. When you look at the labor market in Switzerland, it follows that exact model, that 60 to 70% of the population go through vocational education training and only 30 to 40% are going through the baccalaureate route.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So the numbers add up and we’ve studied an international, and then you studied national. Now locally though there was something that happened here that made it critically important to the economic vitality of this region. Now we said quickly at the very beginning SLO Partners. I think our listener maybe back east doesn’t know what SLO is. So what’s SLO?

 

Michael Specchierla:

SLO’s the term that we call San Luis Obispo. Just look at the initials. People call it SLO County.

 

Mark Sylvester:

And we’re located in central California near the coast. Right now we’re probably half a mile or so from the water. It’s very beautiful here. It’s just untamed beauty, however something happened that’s going to affect this region economically. Dan, what happened?

 

Dan Weeks:

So the largest employer in the County is the utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the only remaining nuclear power plant in California is going to be shutting down in seven years. When it does, it’ll have $1 billion a year of impact to our county.

 

Mark Sylvester:

That’s significant. I mean don’t know what the county budget is.

 

Dan Weeks:

Well the county is only 250,000 people.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Right, so that’s a disproportionate amount of money, right?

 

Dan Weeks:

Yes, massive.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So how long ago did this come on the radar and did it come on your radar? When you said, “Hold it. This is a potential solution, part of the solution.” Of course you’re not going to do a billion dollars in apprenticeship but it’s part of the solution. Tell me how that conversation started.

 

Michael Specchierla:

That just happened to coincide with some of the grants that were coming out like this California Apprenticeship Initiative to develop new and innovated apprenticeship programs, and it really helped frame the context. I remember sitting at an EVC meeting, that’s our local Economic Vitality Corporation and the announcement had just been made that week. Around the table business leaders all had their jaw dropped, that they really were understanding just how much of an impact this was going to have. It was a just a couple of months prior, they had launched a dashboard of the SLO EVC had, and it identified all the six major sectors of our economy. Energy, power and utility was one separate sector, and what was unique about the graphic that we had for that one sector was it has the lowest number of employees, 1,200, but the highest average salary, $150,000. Nuclear engineers make a lot of money.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Yeah they do.

 

Michael Specchierla:

So when everyone said, “That sector is going away,” all the other sectors were wondering, “Can we make up that gap? Is there another emerging sector that’s going to come out? How are we going to work our way out of this problem? We need to start now.”

 

Mark Sylvester:

So you looked at technology companies.

 

Dan Weeks:

Yeah, I think what we did, we know from an entrepreneurialship, if you can set a clear goal that’s future looking, people rally behind it. Change needs to be important and urgent, so what we’ve done in terms of our work on apprenticeship is we’ve stated we want 1,000 additional people in tech before Diablo Canyon, our nuclear power plant, closes in seven years. So everyone knows there’s a number. It’s 1,000 and it’s in seven years. A lot startups make the mistake is we’re going to work hard at this area or that area, but when you have a number, you’re accountable and everyone says, “I want to help you with that.”

 

Mark Sylvester:

So you’ve done … I’m just trying to do the math in my head is 1,000 enough to fill that hole?

 

Dan Weeks:

It’s not … see what we’re looking at is to have 1,000 additional in tech before the Diablo Canyon people even free up.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Right.

 

Dan Weeks:

And so that’s the difference. We’re not saying we’re going to start retraining the 1,500 now Diablo employees for something else. We’re going to have a pipeline. We’re going to diversify the economy before Diablo closes.

 

Mark Sylvester:

I think there’s, if I’m not mistaken, part of the challenge of recruiting companies here is where’s the workforce? You’re suggesting the workforce is here, we’re just not train … There’s a skills gap if you will, or a misalignment with what those businesses need and what you have to provide, and we’re fixing that.

 

Dan Weeks:

Yes, so if you look at Amazon, Amazon’s in San Luis Obispo. They started in San Luis Obispo because they bought a small software startup, but then they realized there’s great people from Cal Poly here, so now Amazon, what they’re doing in San Luis Obispo really isn’t tied to what that startup was. But because they got great loyal workforce that’s highly trained and wants to stay here, they just continue to grow. I think that’s the idea for a lot of tech firms. If you can give them the people they need, they will grow faster and they’ll hire more. You’re getting the fly wheel spinning because you’re giving them what they need to grow their business.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So we understand what the big problem was that needed to be solved here locally, and how was it that you add this entrepreneurial mindset to solving the problem? So we have an educational opportunity but it’s an entrepreneurial mindset that makes it happen. Dan, how did you … first off, how did you get pulled into this vortex?

 

Dan Weeks:

So I knew Michael when he was a teacher at New Tech High School. It’s very entrepreneurial at New Tech High School, and then I heard from one of the local business leaders that there was a grant to do apprenticeship, and I didn’t’ really understand apprenticeship in a tech area. So I talked with Michael because I knew him from before, and then once I heard what it was, and I heard that it was funded, and then I saw Michael had an entrepreneurial mindset that we don’t want to just go through the motions. We want to change the world, I said, “Well, let’s do it.”

 

I think the key in entrepreneurialism is you start with customer discovery. You don’t look in the mirror and say, “Customers are going to love this. Let’s sell it.” You really have to listen, so I used my title as the entrepreneur in resident for Cal Poly’s new business incubator to get people to talk with me. I didn’t do any surveys through email. I just talked with them and about 40 minutes into it, the employers would say, “Well this is what really keeps me up at night.” Then when you get that kind of intelligence … because initially try want to make sure that you’re not just a government program here to help. That’s the last thing they want. They really want to say, “You’re going to help me grow my business and get people who never could have even applied to my openings.”

 

But it took time and now with the apprenticeship that we have every single one of the people we’ve placed, and we’ve placed 27 across 18 companies, none of them were openings that were on the system. They were all strategic investments by employers to give them a competitive advantage because we took the risk out of the system for them. Now they’re just bragging about these amazing people and they want more.

 

Mark Sylvester:

It’s interesting how that mindset, that startup mindset, has been a key to the success of the whole program. Is this … of the things about starting a new business is you have competitors, right? Is this competition for existing programs or this a value added? This is a yes/and rather a either/or?

 

Michael Specchierla:

It should be viewed as a yes/and because I do think this is complementary but depending on your position you may see it as competition. We have a strong relationship with our local community college and we got a lot of really strong superstars out of their computer networking program that really excelled through our bootcamp approach. The difference between the community college, what their pathway and training was compared to ours, is we had the connection to the certifications as well as the direct connection to the job. So when we asked the apprentices, we said, “So does this compete? Does this conflict with? Is this complementary to what you learned at Questa?” Everyone of them said, “Oh no, this was perfect. This was complementary and really an add-on to what we learned at Questa. We went broad and deep at Questa, and here we went fast and a boot camp approach, and it really got me to where I knew exactly what I needed to have for this job, and you connected me with a job so I could be successful.”

 

Mark Sylvester:

So as you’re building these partnerships, and I love the name for the parent organization, SLO Partners, right? It’s just the brand is right in the name, the mission. How does someone go and start building partnerships? I’m guessing you figure out who are all the people you have to partner with, right? So did you start with a map of all the people you had to go talk to to make this work? You guys are laughing like there must have been something.

 

Dan Weeks:

So my approach as an entrepreneur was kind of doing it as a data scientist, which I am. I started by reverse engineering and LinkedIn, every employer in our county who had at least one IT or one computer scientist, and then I came up with 175 companies. What’s interesting, if you look at data that the workforce development boards have and so on, they look more at what’s the single code for the company, but there’s tech everywhere. So our approach was we reverse engineered where the people are and then I prioritized how many total IT and software people were on the list. Then I started from the top and went down, and I stopped at 23 out of the 175.

 

Mark Sylvester:

And that was enough to do what we would in software companies call market validation?

 

Dan Weeks:

Yeah, well our grant is for 50 people in two cohorts. We got more than half in our first cohort already.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Went through them just like that.

 

Michael Specchierla:

So an important thing to recognize with this is if you looked at the official employment development department labor market data, it would actually show that our tech industry in San Luis Obispo is on the decline. If I had used that data to inform my choices, I would have never even pursued the grant. What made me pursue the grant and feel like there were enough tech companies that this would be attractive were my existing connections to people like Dan Weeks and computer science companies working within here as a high school teacher, and an entrepreneurial gut instinct that said this will be attractive.

 

The local community college, rightly so based upon the numbers that they were seeing and their labor market data, they walked away from this grant. They didn’t think it was possible. The Dean of Workforce Development joked with me. We have a great relationship but he said, “Hey, good luck with that. If it works, come back and I’ll be willing to work with you, but you take all the risk on this.” So it was our willingness to take that risk, but that’s also a reflection upon the County Office of Education and Superintendent Electa Breschia of his willingness to take on that risk to explore something new.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Is it fair to say though that those are lagging indicators, not leading indicators?

 

Dan Weeks:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Mark Sylvester:

Yeah, so they’re lagging indicators, and if … We’ve already established this is extremely dynamic, extremely fluid, extremely responsive. Everything about this is about being agile, right? Back to how we run our software teams is through agile development, right? So what you’re suggesting is that the way you went out and talked to business, what are your problems today? Not what was your problem three years ago when you filled out a survey, right?

 

Dan Weeks:

I think that’s really true because even within software testing, for example. When I was with HP, I had all of the tester for our inkjet printers working for me, and it was a career that most people never thought about. But if you have four software developers, someone better be testing it. But if you look at the data about software testing as a career, it doesn’t look like a huge career. But if you actually talk with companies, and they hear they can get certified software testers who love to test … you put a computer science major in software testing, they think it’s a penalty box. But, you get someone who it’s a career, and then when I talk with software companies, they say, “Well how many can I have?”

 

Mark Sylvester:

Right, right.

 

Dan Weeks:

But it’s looking at it … I didn’t’ look at someone else’s data to say, “We need more software testers.” I just knew it.

 

Mark Sylvester:

So as we come to the end of our first episode, we’ve identified what the program is, who should be listening, and because I want to make sure it’s someone’s listened all the way to the end and they go, “Yup, this is exactly the right show for us.” Listener, I hope you’ve taken some notes of people that you want to invite to the show. We’ve gone through kind of the background. I want to, in our next show, dig into nuts and bolts. So in our next show let’s talk about the methodology. Does that sound good?

 

Dan Weeks:

Perfect.

 

Michael Specchierla:

Excellent.

 

Mark Sylvester:

Okay guys. Thank you very much.

 

Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community and say hello to new careers and goodbye to low wage jobs? For more episodes, visit hellocareers.org or send us a note to at hellocareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region. ‘Til next time, I’m Mark Sylvester with Hello Careers.

Mark S.: “The Hello Careers Podcast explores a system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age-old way of learning a skill; apprenticeship. We’ll address issues, such as, where there’s a skills gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community? If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’re looking for. I’m your host, Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.”

“Welcome back to the show, Michael and Dan. By the way, listener, if you didn’t hear the first episode, go back to the Hello Careers website and pick up on that. I want to continue our conversation now, and dig into the methodology of how this works. I want to start with the, it’s a tagline, but the slogan for this effort, which is screen for attitude, train for aptitude. What does that mean?”

Michael: “Well, there are certain skills and attitudes that I think cross all different industries and job sectors.”

Mark S.: “Give me some examples.”

Michael: “Communication skills.”

Mark S.: “Okay.”

Michael: “Teamwork.”

Mark S.: “Yeah.”

Michael: “Rigor. Polish.”

Mark S.: “Yeah.”

Michael: “Collaboration. These are all you know, you can unpack the soft skills and which way, even the idea of a growth mindset or the idea of a fixed mindset. That these are all, we’re going to really frame your attitude of, is this a guy I want working on my team? That’s a key deal breaker for any business. How is this person going to fit on my team? Is he going to disrupt my team? Or is he going to elevate my team?”

“So that’s really where you need to start with, and screen for attitude, train for aptitude. All these new jobs that are being created, you know, there’ll be jobs three to five years from now, we have no idea what they’ll be. It’s going to take somebody with that growth mindset, that teamwork and collaboration, and that relentless, willing to be a relentless learner, that’s going to succeed at that type of a job. They’ll have to relearn their career in two or three years. That’s just an inevitable, I believe.”

Dan: “And they’ll assume they’re going to need to. I think that’s key. With that growth mindset is hey. Things are going to come my way, I’m going to figure it out as I go. And I know it’ll be hard at times, but that’s the way it is.”

Mark S.: “I’ve chosen that. I know when I first got into software, my partner said Mark, 30% of your job every day is reading and staying on top of the technology. And that’s significant amount of time, so you can’t really do that during the day, but that’s you know, now we have access to all the world’s information at our fingertips, so it’s a little easier than it was back then. But I like that idea of the growth mindset. So when we’re thinking about so. For this show, it’s building the organization that it takes the be successful at this process. So I’ve got the two of you guys. So how have you split the workload in this effort? Between the two of you.”

Michael: “It’s been rather opportunistic. When you build a team you need to discover what your strengths are, what each side can bring to the table. And so it becomes you know, learning how to dance together. And knowing who should take the lead during this part, who should take the lead during that part.”

Mark S.: “So one of you needs to be a liaison to education, or not every organization has two people Mike, they just have one, but you need to have a business liaison, and need to have an educational liaison. What’s the skills you need for those?”

Michael: “Yeah, that’s where Dan has really been most instrumental in being the business liaison. And my background in education is really, I can face more towards the education and government side, but I rely upon Dan to really be able to have those conversations with the business community. And I don’t think we would be having such a great relationship with these businesses, unless Dan could introduce himself as the business liaison, and talk to them as a company owner.”

Dan: “I think the other part of it is Michael kept me from having to know all the bureaucracy of being education based. He actually says, and that’s a cool thing in entrepreneurship. You kind of find out what your unique strength is. And instead of trying to make your weakness just average, you say well let’s just split it. You’re much better at that than I am. So I don’t have to think about all the details, anything tied to the bureaucracy of how the game has to be played, being part of the county office of education. He said, I’ll take care of that. And then I can focus.”

Mark S.: “It’s important that you have both. Because you’ve got to you know, I’m looking at public sector, private sector, right. Someone who can clear the path, and knows how to do the dance over in the public sector. You know, we’re using public funds, right. And what are all the things that are attached to that, which just have to annoy the heck out of you, right?”

Dan: “They do. They do, but what’s nice in a partnership is, Micheal and I know each other’s job well enough, we can fill in for each other also.”

Mark S.: “Right. And you’ve both been in meetings and heard that, but that’s taken a little while to figure that part out, right.”

Dan: “It took time. But I think my voice is always going to be what does the employer voice. And always be that voice of the employer. And the employers want a lower risk, and they want to have a strategic advantage.”

Mark S.: “They’re the customer.”

Dan: “Yeah.”

Mark S.: “That was the other thing when we first started talking, was like who’s your customer here.”

Michael: “The business.”

Mark S.: “The business is the customer. And within the business, who’s the customer, because now I’m thinking of the person who’s listening to us in Des Moines. And they’re thinking okay, like we said in our first episode, you went out and found there was 170 plus businesses, and you got that down to 30 something businesses. Who do you talk to at the business?”

Dan: “The smaller the business, the more I focus on the CEO. Because when the CEO does a handshake, we’re going to do it, we’re done.”

Mark S.: “And let’s define small, because-”

Dan: “Oh, less than 50 employees.”

Mark S.: “Okay.”

Dan: “Because what happens with apprenticeship, it’s new and innovative. The larger it gets, the more HR says, oh there’s a bunch of paperwork. You have legal forms for us to sign. And that’s a lot more work. Smaller businesses, you know, if the head of the business says we’re going to do it, and then we’ll just figure it out. The other thing I focused on was if the company’s larger, I focus to the head of IT or engineering. Because they’re the ones who really know what’s needed, HR is kind of further down the road. They get job descriptions someone else did, and often their job descriptions are ten years old.”

Mark S.: “So it’s the hiring manager. It’s like the one who has the vested interest in this.”

Dan: “And it’s often one level up, or two levels up from the hiring manager, because the chief technology officer knows strategically what’s needed. Hiring managers often tactically, what do I have to have today.”

Mark S.: “Good, that’s a great way to think about it. So our, the person listening can start to hone in, I think you also said you use LinkedIn-”

Dan: “Yes.”

Mark S.: “To find these people. So that’s a great way to figure out exactly who that person is.”

Dan: “I think with key words, you have to pay for the higher end version of LinkedIn. But professionals like to raise visibility to their professional background.”

Mark S.: “Right.”

Dan: “And there’s no better way than LinkedIn to find, well who has the key words. Like some of the tricks we did was we looked for certain certifications. Who already has those certifications. Well that’s a great way to know there’s three people at the company who already have the IT certifications that we’re going to be providing in an accelerated schedule. That’s probably good company to talk with.”

Mark S.: “I think that learning how to use search is another one of those skills that, it’s not a soft skill but boy that’s one everybody’s got to be good at right.”

Dan: “Well it’s almost like, you’re thinking almost like a recruiter, but what you’re recruiting is for landing locations for these people we’re developing a career for.”

Mark S.: “Now. Another question I’ve got on liaison, and I’m not sure if this is public or private sector. Chambers of commerce, economic development corporations. Workforce investment boards. That’s public sector right?”

Michael: “Yes.”

Mark S.: “Even though the business, I’m thinking is the chamber of commerce-”

Michael: “Non profits.”

Mark S.: “Chamber of commerce maybe is the middle of that.”

Michael: “All of those are key strategic partners. Chambers of commerce are in a unique position in that they’re trying to reinvent themselves as well. The role of the chamber of commerce has increasingly changed. The US chamber of commerce has a very great initiative called Chamber’s pipeline initiative. So they’ve been very responsive to this idea of working regionally, and being a value add to their members.”

Mark S.: “Right.”

Michael: “By helping them with the pipeline. That’s a common problem that every one of their members who are small business mostly.”

Mark S.: “Sure, sure.”

Michael: “It’s a tight labor market. Businesses left and right are asking, where am I going to find really good quality talent that want to work here? And that’s where Dan’s profile on LinkedIn is superior to mine, because he’s got this entrepreneur in residence title from the HotHouse. Me calling up and saying I’m from the county office of education? Okay, I don’t understand, what do you want? Why do you want this? Versus Dan saying, entrepreneur in residence, it just works.”

Mark S.: “Which leads to I think the next skill, as your building this. Because I’m thinking of the person who maybe has just got a grant, or is thinking of getting a grant, they’re figuring out what kind of team I have to have. You need to have a communication strategy, and someone who’s helping out. So far it’s just been the two of you. But what’s the role of communications, marketing, awareness, all of that in being successful?”

Michael: “You have multiple audiences. That’s been one of our biggest challenges, and opportunities over the last three years is, we have audiences ranging from students, parents, teachers, administrators. To workforce development people, all through public sector. Chambers of commerce. And then the range of businesses. That’s a tall order right there, of all those different audiences that really require some code switching. Because for the value you’re going to bring, is different depending on which person you’re talking to.”

Mark S.: “Now we’re talking about technical things, so when you say code switching, something goes in my mind that is probably not what you meant. What do you mean by code switching?”

Michael: “Knowing how to talk to a business person, versus somebody who is a job developer at the workforce development board. Two different conversations, they’re coming at it from two different motivations and interests.”

Dan: “So. You mentioned a lot of different groups like the chamber of commerce and the workforce development board. When we started our apprenticeship research, started with the employers. Before we rolled it out, we actually had alignment with the chamber of commerce, they did a one off email to all the chamber members saying this is coming.”

Mark S.: “Oh that helped.”

Dan: “Our economic vitality corporation did a one off email saying this is coming. You know, what we did is we built support for our ideas from the business community, before there was even an ask. So a lot of the companies said I’ve heard about this four different ways. Because as entrepreneurs, we were on all the TV stations, we were in the news, we had 940 people apply for 30 openings. Because we approached it as a funded edtech startup. As opposed to a rebranding of people from the community college.”

Mark S.: “So what you just outlined to me was a marketing funnel?”

Dan: “Very much so.”

Mark S.: “At the top it’s awareness, they don’t know who we are, what we exist, which leads to, knowledge, which leads to interest, which leads to liking, which leads to commitment, which leads to a fan, or a customer.”

Dan: “Our tagline was your ticket into tech. And our graphic was a ticket, and below was a ticket with the logo of each of the companies we had already agreed to work with us. So anyone who sees the ticket is immediately tied to a job with a company as opposed to training on tech concepts.”

Mark S.: “And we’ve talked about this just a little inside baseball here, which was we got away from the ticket to tech, because tech may not be as this grows, as you said in the first show, jobs in five years from now may not be tech jobs. They may be in other sectors. So we want to make sure that the person who’s listening to us in some other community now, like well we’re not tech, we’re something else. They need people right, so we wanted to be broader in that regard.”

Dan: “Yes.”

Mark S.: “So having your messages per audience all articulated in advance, and knowing what you were trying to get done, that’s an important piece.”

Dan: “Yes. And I think when employers see other employers logos. They say I want to be part of this. You know, it goes even deeper than that. In our class, the employers for the apprenticeship needed to pitch to the apprentices, why pick my company.”

Mark S.: “Oh?”

Dan: “We flipped it. It’s not a charity case. And so the employers could only talk to the apprentices that had a medium to high priority of even wanting to talk to the company. What ends up happening through that, is the employer said wow, I wish I would have had more of these apprentices, these are amazing people. And some of our top apprentices had four job offers from companies. But what we’ve created is a very skilled person, who now the employers tell each other, I’ve got some of these apprentices, you should too. Or maybe they say, don’t even talk about it, because it’s their secret advantage.”

Michael: “And the employers really, they appreciated getting to know the apprentices over time, of coming in during the training and talking about the context of what their workplace was like, what their company culture was like, having some general Q&A with the whole group. And not just having to rely upon a resume, and a 45 minute interview, to make a choice on hiring. Across the board, business are very reluctant with that, they’ve been bitten once or twice, and want to see a different approach to how they can hire. So this takes the risk out of it for the employer.”

Mark S.: “You’ve just suggested that it’s not a transactional occurrence, but it’s a relationship?”

Michael: “Yes.”

Dan: “It’s totally a dance. And no one gets married on the first date.”

Mark S.: “Right.”

Dan: “And so what they want to do is we’ve created videos of all the people, that captures their personality.”

Mark S.: “Oh, I had not heard that, I love that.”

Dan: “Yeah, so what we did is, and we asked everyone the same questions, so before the employers already came in, they already gave me their list of, these are the people that are the most, that seem to be the best fit for our company culture.”

Mark S.: “Right. Back to the-”

Dan: “Yeah. Well it’s interesting that one company’s top pick is another person’s medium pick. Because it’s a culture fit. There isn’t one type of person that’s going to be great at every company.”

Mark S.: “Which gets back to that soft skills thing that we started off talking about. I’m curious again, thinking of the skills you need to have to build the team for this to be successful. So we know it’s public sector and private sector, and then within the public sector there’s the government relationships that you have to have. And then there’s educational relationships, and those are two different worlds as well. How have you been able to code switch between those worlds?”

Michael: “You know, you just have to keep engaging in conversation, and noticing when there’s misunderstanding, you know. Conflict is not always a bad thing. Conflict helps you come to understanding, often times. So not shying away from that conflict, because obviously what we’re doing is disruptive. And so there will be polarization that will happen. So I think that’s where being part of a county office of education, that gives me a little bit of credibility and transparency. Of that oh no, there’s nothing up with this. I’m pushing the limits here, but I work for an elected official, we work for the county office of education. This is legit.”

Mark S.: “I love that you brought up disruption, because it got me thinking as you were thinking then about crossing the chasm. And as we think about early adopters, and you clearly, I mean the reason we’re doing this show at all is because we know you’re at the front end of this, and we want to go help other groups like this around the country be able to be successful, because it’s working here. We know that. Yet we also know that there is an early majority and a late majority. And when you talked about having the logos on the ticket, I went oh, you’re marketing to late majority. There are people who want to see that it’s already been done.”

Dan: “It’s a social proof. They always are looking for the social proofs.”

Mark S.: “It’s funny, as innovative as we want to think we are, we don’t want to be first most of the time.”

Dan: “It’s hard to scale when you’re first. But you have to be able to say, we’ve done enough on the first pass, that the second pass, you know. For us, we’re going to go from two apprenticeships last summer to five different types this summer. Because we’re learning from what we did last time, and this summer they’re not all tech.”

Mark S.: “So if it’s hard to scale first, you had your, we talked earlier about getting the businesses you were going to call. How did you decide who to call first?”

Dan: “I think once we knew from the initial research, of what areas within tech to focus on. Then you go down the list, and you talk with people, and you basically feed hungry fish.”

Mark S.: “Feed hungry fish?”

Dan: “Yeah.”

Mark S.: “What does that mean?”

Dan: “That means you, for some of the bigger companies, they’re distracted with a lot of other things, so I start going for the medium and the small companies. And so. A lot of mistakes apprenticeships do is they place major bets on the big companies. All the job growth is in small companies. So it’s much better to have this term, the long tail approach. Get 18 small companies, as opposed to bet everything on one big company, because when you work with a big company, you don’t even know who is qualified to commit to apprenticeship. Because it’s probably someone in another office. But in a small company, you know exactly, it’s the person you just shook their hand with.”

Mark S.: “Which makes me, I mean I love how you figure out the target. And that’s why this is so helpful to others. It feels like a pretty mammoth task to go and start something completely new, it’s very innovative, as you said it’s disruptive. People don’t like, the status quo is just fine thank you. I mean you had to do it here in this region, because there’s a billion dollar shortfall coming in seven years, and the leadership said let’s get out in front of that. There may not be this industry leaving the community, but from an economic vitality reasoning, you want to get going on this. So Michael, who did you go talk to first?”

Michael: “Well I started talking to one of the local manage service providers, Clever Ducks. And I did that because I knew that they were a well known company, I’d have a previous relationship with them through new tech high school that they were open to, wanting to see, how could high school students be brought into their community. And that’s where I started. And that’s how Dan-”

Dan: “That’s how I heard about it.”

Mark S.: “Then, so let’s go to the political side. How much political cover did you need? Or do you need?”

Michael: “Well yes, I did need political cover. Because the apprenticeship grant was through the California apprenticeship initiative, which is run by the California community college chancellor’s office. And so I first deferred to the community college of, did you want to pursue this grant? And they did not feel that there was enough of a demand, or a supply, that could fit a new registered apprenticeship. But my boss, Dr Brescia, who’s an elected official, thought this was worthwhile to go through. Because of how it would develop relationships with businesses, based upon the information I gave him about Switzerland and South Carolina. As well as wanting to really bring new novel programs of taking that risk, that businesses, community college or established institutions weren’t willing to take. Of taking on that risk. He thought that was a role that the county office of education should play in looking for new and innovative programs.”

Mark S.: “So that leadership role, then you could parlay that conversation into going to talk to other elected officials.”

Michael: “Yes.”

Dan: “I think the key in entrepreneurship is the term we like, which is called launch and learn. Entrepreneurs never have all the data they wish they had.”

Mark S.: “Right.”

Dan: “But if you do enough customer discovery, and you’re willing to adapt as you learn more, you’re fine. But I think the larger the organization is, in general, they either want it to be an automatic slam dunk, which probably won’t be innovative, because the reason it hasn’t been done before is this is hard.”

Mark S.: “Yeah. If it was easy everybody would do it, right. I mean again, another reason for doing the show is to help people learn from the trails you’ve already blazed. And so they don’t go, for instance. You go talk to the top three employers, the biggest employers, and you may get the door slammed in your face, or maybe your call not returned. Whereas as you said, go to smaller, less than 50 people, CEO led, where you build a relationship. And I want to stay on the relationship piece, because that seems to be a thread that’s gone through every single thing you’ve done that’s been successful, it’s because of a relationship.”

Dan: “It is. I think when you put yourself in the shoes of the employer. You start realizing, what would I wish I had if I was that person? And when you have that mentality, you realize it’s a moving target what they need. But what they told us, the employers told us, is a lot of the more entry level people’s resume has nothing to do with the job they’re applying for. But it’s a huge amount of risk for them to bring someone who’s had a retail job, into an entry level IT job. They don’t even know if, two things. Would they be good at it, and would they like it. What we do with apprenticeship, and our pre-apprenticeship, is we assess. Are you good at it, and do you like it? Because then you combine, they already have this great attitude, but we’ve been able to assess their aptitude, before the interview.”

Mark S.: “Do you use, do you have a, we’ll talk about this in another episode. But actually this would be the perfect time to talk about it, because one of the things that you have that’s been successful is an apprenticeship committee.”

Dan: “Yes.”

Mark S.: “And that, is that where you ask those questions?”

Dan: “Well I think the apprenticeship committee just came from the leaders from the 27, you know, where we placed the 27 people. And I think the apprenticeship committee are the ones who say this is important, this isn’t important.”

Michael: “Yeah. The apprenticeship committee are really our business champions. But it also has education groups. But it still, the customer relationship and customer engagement and customer development, really still needs to happen. That a business that’s growing can’t take that much time away from their business. But knowing that you want that feedback, and you want to engage them where they’re at, and you want to listen to them. Is really what we’re finding businesses are willing to keep engaging with us if we’re very conscious of not over taxing them. But being responsive to them.”

Mark S.: “So who, on the screening, who screens these, you said you had 900 plus applicants. How did you do that screening, have you developed an instrument for that?”

Michael: “We’re still refining that, but we have come up with a number of really good strategies to help go through and screen through a series of challenges and interviews. There’s some online components, where you can ask some specific questions, and get sort of a basic profile of who this person is. And then your next step is to really search through and scan through that, and determine who’s going to be worthy of a phone screening next. And so that’s where your relationships with your local workforce development boards, who also have their own screening processes, so they can find out whether someone’s eligible for any types of government assistance funding. And then there’s also some machine learning programs that we’re working with that help us really assess those soft skills. Of being able to assess your teamwork, your collaboration skills. Through short assessments. So we can really find out, are you a good fit for this type of profile, this type of team, this type of company.”

Mark S.: “And I think what we’ll do in this episode, in the sidebar we’ll put a list of all these links, of the things that you’ve learned, because it’s dynamic we’ll change those over time. And if there’s some, like for me sometimes it’s just like what are the questions. Give me 20 to pick from and I’ll pick three or four that I like, and you’ve probably figured out what high performing or most effective questions are.”

Dan: “A simple one on the IT side is have you ever built up a PC? You know, it’s just, someone mentioned to me once, you can tell someone’s passion, who’s high school level, what’s in their room. But if what’s in your room are drones, you’re probably interested in a drone type company. If what’s in your room are PCs that you’ve built up, you’re probably going to be a really good fit for IT, because you’re working with them. What we have to make sure of is we don’t place someone in a career where they’re not really interested in their spare time to stay on top of that industry. And, which you mentioned earlier, and I think, you have to say, I love this industry, or I can bring you up to speed enough in our pre apprenticeship, that I’m now in love with that industry.”

Mark S.: “I think that that also speaks to what you’re creating here are not jobs.”

Dan: “No.”

Mark S.: “They’re careers.”

Dan: “That’s the key.”

Mark S.: “And if it’s a career, it’s kind of what I do all the time. It’s who I am. Right, I mean as much as we say a job doesn’t define you, the criticism, yeah. It does until you get a little older and you figure out it’s not just the work, but you’re consumed. I’ve talked to a couple of your apprentices, and it is not nine to five, right. They, someone said if you think your five to nine is different from the nine to five, then there’s no such thing as work life balance really anymore. And he was admitting to checking service tickets you know, before he went to sleep. And I was like yeah, there you go, that’s what it is.”

“I want to finish this second episode, real quickly on how the lean startup mentality has impacted the organization itself.”

Dan: “Michael you want to speak to the lean campus and how we use it?”

Michael: “Yeah, I think everything that we’re talking about is really the lean startup mentality. That you’ve got to really figure out what’s your value proposition. What we’ve been really focusing on with that customer engagement is to define, what is that value proposition that we have for the companies. And that’s how we arrived at the screen for attitude, train for aptitude. And there’s certain exercises that you can go through, in a lean startup, you want to be able to have your business plan on one page.”

Mark S.: “Yeah.”

Michael: “And so being able to be concise, and clear about what your business plan is, and what your strategies are, was critical for us. And so I would regularly rely upon Dan, to walk us through that exercise, weekly, monthly, to just check our blind spots, and make sure we’re headed in the right direction. And so that’s where Dan’s experience as an entrepreneur, and then just my diligence of all right, check our blind spots, are we on track? What does the business model canvas say we should be doing, and what are we focused on right now?”

Mark S.: “And that’s not normal in a public sector operation.”

Michael: “No, you should follow the grant. And that was really one of the things that was nice about this grant, was the recognized that you’re going to write the plan, to get the grant, but then step one was go out and talk with businesses. And I think where some of the other grant award winners are stumbling is, they may be sticking with the playbook that they wrote. Maybe they went elephant hunting, and got stuck with a couple of whales that really weren’t ready for this type of an apprenticeship. And weren’t being as responsive to their business customers as they should be. Maybe they were trying to market existing programs to businesses. That may be not what they wanted.”

Mark S.: “Guys, thank you so much, this is, this second show, covering the methodology. There were a lot of learnings and lessons inside of there, so listener, go look on the site, you’ll be able to download that, so you’ll have all of that, so you were probably listening and not taking notes, you can go back and get that. And next up in our next episode, we’re going to talk about the benefits. Because we’ve been talking about the what, I want to talk about the why. Like why this is important and how you codify all that.”

“Guys thanks a lot, we’ll talk to you next show.”

“Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community, and say hello to new careers, and goodbye to low wage jobs? For more episodes, visit HelloCareers.org. Or send us a note to podcast@hellocareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region. Till next time, I’m Mark Sylvester with Hello Careers.”

Mark Sylvester: The Hello Careers podcast explores a system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must scream for attitude and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age old way of learning a skill, apprenticeship. We’ll address issues such as, where there is a skills gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community? If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program, or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your host Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with a T.

Mark Sylvester: Well, welcome back to the show, Michael and Dan. I love how our conversation has been going so far. People have listened to the first episode, our last episode. We talked about the methodology, yet we focus on this idea of communicating. We need to build partnerships. We need to communicate to them. What is it we want to communicate? We want to talk about benefits. So, what I’d like to talk about this episode is: What are all the benefits of this program? I know you talked about launch and learn, Dan. And you’ve probably learned some benefits that have happened, that you didn’t predict up in advance. So, let’s spend this time talking about benefits and how important that is to the LEA, and I’m going to drop my own buzzword here, which is the local education agency community. What’s in it for those folks?

Dan Weeks: Well, I think this is really a great way to inform you as an administrator, as a teacher, about what are the emerging skills that are valued by your local companies. That’s what you need to inform curriculum and stay relevant with your curriculum. That’s also the hardest thing for a teacher or administrator or school to really stay in touch with, is how do I stay relevant with my curriculum so that the school’s product, which is a student, is valued.

Mark Sylvester: That just feels like a mammoth task, especially as we are thinking about tech and how things have changed so quickly. I mean, they changed since we started this show. Right? That’s a big burden to put on them. So, the benefit then of this program for the LEA is that you’re thinking about that.

Dan Weeks: Yeah, no teacher wants to revise their curriculum. It takes years to implement a curriculum, and then to go and revise it again, it’s just starting the whole process over again. So, how do you help them in informing them what types of things could be beneficial to them? How is this going to benefit me? What I’m doing now is working. My tests tell me that it’s working.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: So, you have to create that return on investment for the teachers where they can actually see and poke it, prod it, show them, not tell them what could be the value of adapting their curriculum.

Mark Sylvester: So, Dan, for the business community, because you were the one having to make those phone calls to them, and before you had a cohort, right, you were just talking about the imagined benefits, how did the expected, I won’t say imagined, expected benefits line up to what actually has happened, and what are you finding are the top three benefits for business?

Dan Weeks: I think a lot of the benefits were similar to what I’ve thought. I think a lot of the companies’ job openings weren’t for people with no experience. They were all looking for the people with two years of experience, but what was being created from community college was people with zero years of experience. So, I knew that one of the big benefits is going to be a whole new set of people for the employers that they can feel comfortable bringing on board through apprenticeship that they no longer have to have this gap of two years of experience. I think the other thing we’re learning, we’re following up twice a month with all our apprentices of how’s it going, and at the same time all the supervisors, all the journeymen, how’s it going in the program. I think what we’re finding is the next time we do this program, there are certain things that we’re going to include up front and other things that are going to be customized, ’cause only one company wants this and that. And I think we have to figure out how we determine what’s in our core curriculum and what’s actually on the job training that’s specific to an employer.

Dan Weeks: That experience is really the benefit for both the business and the school systems, because that’s what’s usually missing from any type of academic study of a discipline.

Mark Sylvester: Yes, the practicum.

Michael Specchierla: The practicum. And it’s the toughest thing to incorporate within a school or classroom environment. So, being able to set up that relationship through apprenticeship between the business, where they are willing to offer that type of experience, is invaluable to a school. How do you set up those relationships between a school and a business? How do you make it a valuable relationship for both sides? The school wants to get an opportunity for their students toward an experience. But the business wants an employee. They want a return on investment, too.

Mark Sylvester: I’m guessing that an important part for an organization that’s wanting to do this and an important part for you are going to be case studies. Because you’ve built these relationships, and it wasn’t teach them, put them in the position and then leave, you’re actually talking to them two times a month. That’s going be a challenge when you scale more, right?

Dan Weeks: Correct. I think part of what we’ve learned is there’s ways you can use technology to get the ongoing voice of the customer, but one of the things we’re doing is just a phone call.

Michael Specchierla: Right. Exactly.

Dan Weeks: A low tech way, because people will answer through a phone call. When it’s just an online survey, you’ll push it off. So, that’s another way we’re learning, is how do we get the data quickly but not be delayed. That’s part of the launch and learn.

Mark Sylvester: That’s also going to feed into the case studies, ’cause you know these people, you know how it’s working. I mean, it’s that. And again, it’s still nascent, right? So, you’re learning what you need to do. What’s in it for the public sector?

Michael Specchierla: Well, we’re creating jobs.

Mark Sylvester: There you go, creating jobs.

Michael Specchierla: That’s really where this iterative process of getting that feedback loop going between the employer and the employee and making sure it’s supported. That’s what your public sector is all about. That’s what they should be supporting. Those are the building blocks of your economy. What are the jobs out there? Do you have thriving businesses that can support those people so that the lifestyle that you want to see in your community is supported.

Dan Weeks: I think it’s important when Michael just said “creating jobs” versus filling jobs. We created jobs. They weren’t openings that we just gave from a union hall of people for a job. We actually did the dialog. They said, okay, I will grow in this area with this type of person, who normally I wouldn’t have brought in.

Mark Sylvester: So, give me an example of that. I kind of feel like we’ve buried the lead. The thing is creating jobs. Right? We didn’t’ talk about that at the very head, but that is the primary benefit, right, creating jobs and getting a work force so that these businesses can grow, which includes the tax base and all of the things that happen we that. We know when people have jobs our crime rates go lower. There’s all kinds of good things that happen when we have the job. Right? And that’s the hard part, is figuring out, well, what jobs do we need? And you said, well, let’s create them. Give me an example of that conversation.

Dan Weeks: Sure, so I’ll talk about an IT service provider in San Luis Obispo. I told him what we’re doing in terms of the background. He says, “I have a bad experience of hiring anyone that doesn’t have two years of on the job training.” So, I said, “Well, let me tell you how selective we were.” And I said, “In the first to months we’ll have half the normal salary, and if you’re not happy with the person, give them back to me, and I’ll find another home for them.” So, we did that 27 times, and only in one case did we find another home, and we found another home for that person in a couple weeks. But from the employer’s perspective, it’s like, “Oh, you did the steps to really find someone amazing, and you’re willing to stick your neck out to say this person really is good, and I’ll give you my version of a guarantee.” They’re not used to that.

Michael Specchierla: So, notice how we’re using the grant money to create a business incentive and take the risk out. That’s a worthwhile use of your one time money to build value proposition, to build that credibility of your product, which in this case, apprentices. So, most of the jobs that are in any region, there’s really a hidden job market out there. There’s the job that you’ll see on Indeed or Monster or that have been posted on or whatever your workforce development board job menu is. But then there’s the hidden job market. I think everyone can hear a story of a business person meeting someone who really impressed them and wanting to lure them to their company. That’s the scenario and that’s the strategy that we took with these apprentices. We wanted to screen for attitude, train for aptitude, find really good quality candidates who would impress these businesses, so they would want to take them on. Otherwise, their competitor would take them.

Mark Sylvester: There’s something else there, thought, that reminds me of when I was looking for salespeople. It was this aptitude idea, this attitude idea, like was there someone at a clothing store who was an amazing salesperson, like they were like, “Oh, my gosh, could I teach them to sell software? Yeah, probably.” It’s hard to teach someone how to just have that right attitude. To your point, so you also then mitigated the risk in this first 27. Right?

Michael Specchierla: Yes.

Dan Weeks: We embraced the hybrid nature of people’s background. The more someone has a diverse background, the better. Because, if someone worked in customer service and loves IT, that’s going to be an even better fit than someone who just loves IT, because they have multiple skills. We love and employers really like the fact … You are a stay at home mom who’s getting back into the work environment. All of your life experiences to date are extremely valuable because they helped you in your attitude and now you have the aptitude.

Michael Specchierla: I think the over specialization is actually a bad thing in trying to get yourself more employable. Hybrid skills, hybrid viewpoints, multiple backgrounds, that’s increasingly what businesses are looking for. So, by adding on these tech skills to somebody who has maybe a background in performance and theater arts and then they’re a software tester, you have somebody who’s an excellent communicator. They’re going to know how to tell the developing team that their code is broken. Give them those skills to become duality assurance. They’ve already proven that they can be detail oriented. They had to work with a director, they had to help out with getting the production moving. That’s great crossover skill to bring into a quality assurance job.

Mark Sylvester: You mentioned moms coming back into the workplace. I just had a recent example of someone who was very, very frightful of going back because how much things have changed, and she’s only been out for three years. I’m not thinking of someone who’s been out for, you know, 10 years, but just three years. She says, “Oh, it’s all different. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Actually, she becomes an ideal candidate for you.

Dan Weeks: I think what we did knowing our target audience was the people with the great attitude skills, when we did our marketing, we said, “No experience required.” We did everything possible to not say these were IT or software testing jobs, called it “tech” on purpose, because tech is broad and tech doesn’t sound scary, where they’re not self selecting, “I can’t do that.”

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Dan Weeks: So, that really helped us. For our software testers, 47% are women. And in tech that’s a breakthrough. You know, a lot of computer science grads are 15% women. We’re almost 50%.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, that’s another show when we talk about women in tech and STEM and all of that.

Dan Weeks: But it’s marketing to say the employers would love to have people with that breadth of experience, but how do you get people to say, you know the potential apprentices to say, “I think I could do that.”

Michael Specchierla: The businesses across the board were telling us, “We can’t find motivated problem solvers.”

Dan Weeks: That’s great wording.

Mark Sylvester: I love that. “Motivated problem solvers.” That’s my life. I’m a motivated problem solver.

Michael Specchierla: That’s our light that we were looking for, that when we were screening people and going through and building this program, that we’re really looking for, regardless of your background, are you a motivated problem solver. Can you adapt to this? Are you are relentless learner, and are willing to go down this path?

Mark Sylvester: I think we found our first ancillary product that we can put on the website, is a t-shirt that says, “Motivated problem solver.” I would think these students would probably want to wear one of those. Right? I’d be proud to wear one of those.

Dan Weeks: But you see how that works no matter where industry goes? That’s a valuable core.

Mark Sylvester: Absolutely. It’s agnostic, right, in terms of what industry it is. One of the other things that you told me that businesses really appreciated, and it’s really tough, is if I’ve got to import talent, but this program works on local talent. So, it’s people who are already here. Tell me more about why that became so important.

Michael Specchierla: You know, in San Luis Obispo, and I think across the nation now, unemployment isn’t the problem. It’s underemployment. You’ve got a job or maybe you’re doing a couple of jobs to make all your ends meet. So, how do you create a program or a strategy that helps take these underemployed people and get them into the areas where there are gaps in skills and really where employment is needed. It’s a tight labor market out there. So, how do we bring people from dead end jobs into careers where there is opportunity?

Mark Sylvester: I’m gonna guess … Take me back to how you got the 900 plus applicants, ’cause you specifically were playing into their mindset. Was it ads? How did you get the word out?

Dan Weeks: So, our first step was to get the word out in the business community that this is coming. It’s a good source of feedback of the business community thing. Is this a good idea? The way we knew we were on to something is everyone we talked to in the business community would have by name of at least one person they thought should sign up for the program.

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Dan Weeks: That was key. So, when our local newspaper did an article that they held back for the Sunday paper, they put it on Facebook earlier the following week, 200 people in a row on Facebook directly shared it by name to the person that they thought should apply for the program. It went viral because everyone knew of someone, this is exactly what person X needed in their life right now. We were intelligent how we used our funding, ’cause the tagline in the newspaper said, “This is your ticket into tech, and they pay you to learn.”

Mark Sylvester: Wow.

Michael Specchierla: Earn and learn. That’s the secret of apprenticeship.

Mark Sylvester: I love it. So, figuring those secrets out … I love also that we know that there’s paid audience, there’s organic audience, and then there’s earned audience. Earned audience is the one we want. It sounds like that’s what you got.

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, earned media combined with targeted Facebook ads.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, and then getting everybody to share them. That’s brilliant. Tell me then also how you got these businesses to create positions that didn’t exist, ’cause I’m thinking as a business owner, creating new slots … I’ve got this work, but how did you have that conversation, and how did it go so well?

Dan Weeks: I think to some degree you look at companies who have openings, but then you look at, well, their openings wanted five years of experience. I’m thinking, well, you’re going to have a hard time filling it. You can also look, how long has this job been open. So, the data person in me says if you see a lot of openings that have been open for a long time, there’s a fundamental problem. Then in the dialog, we say, “Well, what if we tried this? If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You can give it back.” Then what ends up happening is they realize, “Oh, I like that. Can I have more?” Then that’s our second cohort to give them the second crop. But the first time you do anything in entrepreneurship, you kind of have to go over the top. So, we did that. We did everything over the top to have credibility. The second time, we’re not starting from scratch. But to me, when we do our second cohort we’ll have a lot more applicants than we had last time, ’cause everyone who’s in the program is gonna have all their friends wanting to sign up.

Mark Sylvester: All their buddies, right. Exactly. Tell me, you had, Michael, talked about the hidden job market early. Can I make a connection here that there are hidden job openings?

Dan Weeks: Oh, sure. Because I think some of the companies on an ongoing basis, well, they’ll say, “We’re always looking for good people.” But what they have to say is, “They’re good people that our competitors will get unless we’re part of this.”

Mark Sylvester: Got it.

Michael Specchierla: That’s a unique point in our program in that many times apprenticeships are single employer apprenticeships, where it’s one company decides to work with the state of California or the federal Government to create a registered apprenticeship and it’s just that one company and they dictate what the processes are. Ours is very unique in that we’re a multi employer program, and we are also the local education agency. The county office of education is working with multiple employers to define what are these common entry level jobs for this apprenticeship. In our case it was IT, networking, and software testing.

Mark Sylvester: So, if we ever want to get to where Switzerland has 40% of the businesses, you can’t work with just one, and you can’t work with just one industry. Right? But you’ve picked the right one to start out with, because it’s attractive, it’s high paying, there are some obvious holes. I mean, this will keep you busy for a little while, which brings me to curriculum. How did you decide … I’m gonna answer my own question. You went and talked to the businesses. How did you figure out the curriculum?

Michael Specchierla: Well, what really helped us align with the curriculum the business needs was, especially in the IT world, looking at what certifications the businesses would value. So, there became this conversation of, “Alright, I’ll keep on having this conversation about taking someone on with limited experience.” We then asked them, or they were asking us, “When can I have billable hours with this person?”

Mark Sylvester: Ah.

Michael Specchierla: ‘Cause the business wants a return on investment.

Mark Sylvester: Sure.

Michael Specchierla: They’re willing to take a risk, but what’s the return on investment? So, it became a point of aligning with those certifications that really told them that, “Oh, I know this person has the skills where I can put them on the floor or I can put them in front of a customer, and I know they can solve some help desk tickets on the IT side or on the software testing side, that they know the procedures and protocols to help run a test.”

Mark Sylvester: So, then working backwards it was, we know what they job wants, what the requirements are. We know what the requirements for the certification are. Let’s go and backfill that, figure out what the curriculum needs are.

Michael Specchierla: Yes.

Mark Sylvester: You mentioned earlier a word I had not heard yet, which was a “registered apprenticeship program.” Is that a thing?

Michael Specchierla: Yes. Anybody can have an apprenticeship. You can say, “Oh, I’ve got a protegee or …” Donald Trump did it with his apprenticeship, but it wasn’t registered, though. The state of California has always had registered apprenticeship programs. There’s division of apprenticeship standards. Apprenticeship in California and the nation is really dominated by your traditional trades. So you have your unions in there. Part of what the community college chancellor’s office was trying to do with the California Apprenticeship Initiative was to expand the apprenticeship modes into new sectors that would really be beneficial for the apprenticeship strategy. And so, that’s where I think technology with its rapid change and evolution, I think the on the job training and the learn and earn model is a ripe area for developing registered apprenticeships.

Mark Sylvester: I hadn’t understood that before. That makes a ton of sense.

Michael Specchierla: And that adds an additional certification, because the state of California or the federal government are then certifying that these people got this much experience with this company at this point in time here. So, they then have a portable certificate that says that they can take throughout California or the nation, saying, “Yeah, this person is experienced now.” ‘Cause that’s really the trick. How do you get someone into the job market when experience is your barrier?

Dan Weeks: One of the points you were asking earlier about certifications, our initial approach that we tested with employers and we shifted based on employer feedback was to start the on the job training with minimal amount of certifications up front but at a low cost to the employer. A lot of the pushback is you’re putting too much risk on me right now, because I want to put them through the paces after they have these certifications under their best, and really give them an interview not just on their soft skills but on what they actually know. So, we front loaded our certifications specifically so that we have credibility from the employers that in those 14 weeks you did some amazing things. If we didn’t’ have the certifications, we would have minimal credibility that we were able to take a non IT person and create an IT person in 14 weeks.

Michael Specchierla: During that 14 weeks there were ample opportunities for the business to be inside and meet the people and start to get to know who they were.

Dan Weeks: Yes, the dance began early.

Michael Specchierla: Right, which so they get a sense of who the … stay with the dance, you know, who the better dancers are. Right? As it turned out, you had 27 great dancers. So, who knew that you were gonna have such good success? I think it’s probably ’cause of the screening process.

Dan Weeks: I think what’s interesting, ’cause when the employers came back they said, “Oh, he’s that person in the back corner that asked those great questions when we were pitching.” They were really tracking when they were talking with the class who was interacting, who was engaged, and they already had their list of who they wanted to hire at the end of the process.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, my radar would be lit. I can imagine going into that room of fish, so to speak. You had said, how long was it gonna take them to get billable hours. So, now I’ve got my 14 weeks, now they come on, and I’ve got some onboarding time. Because you’re talking to them two times a month, do you have a sense of that that period of time looks like? Is it another 14 weeks, or is it shorter than that?

Michael Specchierla: I think that’s how we came up with using the grant money to do a wage offset for the businesses for the first two months of sharing in the cost of those employment wages for the first two months and calling that sort of their probationary period.

Mark Sylvester: Oh, got it.

Dan Weeks: That was from the employers saying, “That’s a good amount of time. I’ll know pretty well within one month, and two months I’ll really know.” But that was their number telling us.

Mark Sylvester: What was their out?

Dan Weeks: They could say, “I want to put this person back in the apprenticeship pool.” And I made that offer to them if it wasn’t a good culture fit in the current position.

Michael Specchierla: So, we’re standing by our product.

Mark Sylvester: Right, right.

Michael Specchierla: And we’re also kind of a money back guarantee, and we’re putting some skin in the game as well. So, that’s what built the relationship, because really it’s a new, innovative program. What’s our credibility? This is our first prototype. We’ve got to put it out to the market, and we’ve got to be able to get those taste tests back.

Mark Sylvester: So, someone might be listening to this episode a year from now, but for this episode, how many weeks or how many months has it been that your first cohort has been in the market?

Dan Weeks: For many of them it’s like probably month three and a half, four, something like that.

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, about the fourth month right now, ’cause November and December was when we placed the majority of them. Then others began right after Christmas break.

Mark Sylvester: And your indications now are?

Dan Weeks: They’re very positive. I think we’ve built the credibility that these people are incredible performers. Really we’re having to size up how big is our effort just to provide the second round of people to our current companies, much less add additional companies.

Mark Sylvester: Right, that was my next thing. If you’ve got a great product, everybody wants it, now we have a new problem. Right?

Michael Specchierla: Yes.

Mark Sylvester: Our new problem is I don’t have enough product. So, how many students are you looking at in the next cohort?

Dan Weeks: Well, I think our grant is for a total of 50, and we already have 27 of the 50. So, it’ll be at least the same. I would say it would be at least the same size as what we did.

Mark Sylvester: Is it also fair to say that those people are kind of already placed? Because the existing relationship you have with the employers … say, “Oh, I’ll take another.”

Dan Weeks: I think it’s all a question of timing. That’s what we’re learning. Michael likes to say, “Tie it to employer orders.” So, part of where we’re innovating is we might do smaller cohorts every quarter as opposed to a batch. You know, more like sprints. For this sprint, how many people do you have? Which is really just in time for the employer, which they really want, as opposed to saying, “Only once a year do I get these amazing people.”

Mark Sylvester: Which brings us all the way back to being a pop-up university. Right? You pop up at the right time with the right people with the right skills. You guys, another great conversation getting into all of the benefits of this, which is really gonna help the person listening figure out how to tune their program. We know 80% of it’s gonna be the same, but there’s gonna be 20% that’s gonna be different in different regions, right, all of that.

Michael Specchierla: It’s an iterative process. That’s what’s gonna get you the quality and the responsiveness.

Mark Sylvester: This program is going to be different, right, ’cause you’re launch and learn. Right? I love that. Our next show what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about working with business partners and potential employers. So, we’ve been talking at a high level, so we’ll get down into some more tactics on that. Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community and say hello to new careers and goodbye to low wage jobs? For more episodes, visit hellocareers.org. Or send us a note to podcast@hellocareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region. Till next time, I’m Mark Sylvester with Hello Careers.

Mark Sylvester: The Hello Careers podcast explores the system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves.

We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our inside to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age old way of learning a skill, apprenticeship.

We’ll address issues such as, where there’s a skills gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community?

If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program, or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your host, Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.

Well welcome back to the show everybody. Michael, Dan, as we were talking in our last episode, we were talking about the benefits of the overall program. But a huge part of the work is building these partnerships. So what I thought we’d do, is the next couple of episodes, I want to talk about that. It’s obvious when you hear it, but the actually how you do it. Let’s take a deep dive on that.

I would like to start with business partners who are the potential employers. That’s the customer. Let’s start with the customer. Dan, you bring this wealth of business experience with you and also as the entrepreneur in residence here at the Incubator here in San Luis Obispo.

And we’ve already heard how you went about finding these people. Tell me how you got them from a person who’s aware of their program and said yes, let’s have that meeting to turning them into a partner. And we have some time, so I want to hear all the individual bits.

Dan Weeks: What I did was pretty simple initially. I figured out the companies to target and I send a LinkedIn request. And I looked at who would respond to my LinkedIn request. And I mentioned in an earlier episode, the idea about feed hungry fish.

Spend time with the people that have at least the amount of interest that they’ll at least respond to a LinkedIn request. And then, I take it to the next step. Once they’ve done that, I say, hey I’d like to talk with you more about what we’re doing.

But I think you can’t assume its make or break if you get company A or company B or company C. It’s an abundance mentality. There’s plenty of companies. There’s plenty. But you really say, from each, you have to speak it from a position of power. You want to be part of this because these are going to be the kind of people that if you’re not part of it, you’re really going to feel like you missed out on something.

Mark Sylvester: Notice how Dan said he wasn’t selling them something. He didn’t come there with a predetermined answer.

Dan Weeks: Yeah. I think that’s key.

Mark Sylvester: There was something in the last episode I made a note of but didn’t bring up ’til now, but it’s what we now call FOMO. Right? It’s the fear of missing out. And so you were … were you explicitly trying to create that? Or you found that evolved?

Dan Weeks: I think it’s different on the IT side because we had two … for our first cohort we had two areas, IT networking/security and software testing. The two very different conversations with employers.

On the IT security and networking, these are people that they’re already able to find locally, and our real value proposition is getting these people who have certifications, not just class work, but also have that attitude. Have that screening process.

These are the top 4% of all the people interested in the county. Employers love hearing that, but they don’t want …

Mark Sylvester: Who are the top 4%?

Dan Weeks: The people who made our program. When you do the math of 940 down to what it’s …

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: … it’s single digit percent of the interested people who ended up in apprenticeship here.

Mark Sylvester: That’s the cream of the top.

Dan Weeks: But that’s what the employers want to hear. What they don’t want to here is we had 10 openings and 13 people applied.

Mark Sylvester: Back to the abundance.

Dan Weeks: Yeah. And so I think what they want to hear is these are people and the videos were key.

Mark Sylvester: Videos?

Dan Weeks: ‘Cause we did a video for each of the people. One other step, let me take a step back.

When we started with 940, we didn’t immediately pick our apprentices. We took the top 50 of the 940 and then eight weeks later we picked the top 30 of the top 50.

Michael Specchierla: I’ll correct you on one thing. 940, screen through as many as possible. There was a portion of the 940, they came in so late at the end of the application process it wasn’t feasible to give them a shot.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: We got it boiled down to 100 people that we really wanted to have a face to face interview with.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah.

Michael Specchierla: And that was after a lot of phone calls. So out of the 100, we then selected 50 that we wanted to place a bet on. Out of the 50, we did eight weeks of what we call pre-apprenticeship where we did just one certification called A+ certifications. The most foundational and basic of all the IT certifications. It’s sort of a crash course on, do you know hardware? Do you know basic software? Can you do some basic help desk kind of stuff?

And that showed us whether they had some aptitude for further training. Then we picked 30, of which we bifurcated between those who wanted to go towards IT. And I stress that point of they wanted to go towards IT.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: Or, they wanted to go toward software testing and possibly development.

Dan Weeks: That’s a great point, having that interim stage of the 940 down to 100. Figuring out face to face, who are the top 50 based on interviewing 100 of them.

Michael Specchierla: And then taking people who really, many of them, did not have a background in tech, and exposing them to tech. And allowing them to make that choice of which do they feel more passionate about. Hardware versus software.

Mark Sylvester: Where’s the video come in?

Dan Weeks: We video taped all the 50 people in that eight week training class.

Mark Sylvester: Individual?

Dan Weeks: Yeah, one at a time. It was basically their personal value prop.

Michael Specchierla: It was part of our soft skills training that we wanted to make sure they all had … that they had a story they were able to tell and they were able to brand themselves towards the company.

Dan Weeks: If you go to YouTube. IT Ready San Luis Obispo, you’ll see them.

Mark Sylvester: Really? Those are all …

Dan Weeks: Yeah, they’re still there. Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: So, I just had a business idea. There is now a cottage industry for video to teach people how to be one of the 100. Right? If you want to be one of the 100, here’s a video or a class, maybe there’s a class that they go take. To learn how to get to that …

Again, the person who would actually take that class, that is actually a qualifier.

Dan Weeks: Well, they’re proactive.

Mark Sylvester: Right?

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: Right. So of those, 940, I don’t want to create more problems for you, but if they at least had a half hour. This is what’s going to happen. This is what we’re looking for. Go watch these videos, these are the things you want to be ready to do.

Dan Weeks: The videos were key because after I got the dialogue started, I said, here’s an example of three videos to watch.

Mark Sylvester: Ah.

Dan Weeks: And then when they watched the three, they said, okay you got me. Because it wasn’t about me, it was, I’m just showing these amazing people that they normally wouldn’t have applied to their job. And then they say, now let’s talk. Let’s talk more.

Michael Specchierla: And the apprentices really told their story.

Mark Sylvester: Sure.

Michael Specchierla: Of what their journey was. That we had given them … we had put them through the paces. We had really given them a challenge to overcome and so they were able to present themselves as motivated problem solvers.

Mark Sylvester: Were the videos of the 100 or the 50?

Dan Weeks: 50.

Michael Specchierla: 50.

Mark Sylvester: Of the 50, that you place the bet on. I love this because I want to know of the 27 who made it through and who are now three and a half months in, I would love to have them watch their video.

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: And tell me … ‘Cause it’s going to feel like it’s forever ago that they did that video.

Dan Weeks: Sure.

Mark Sylvester: And they’re going to look at it and go, huh that’s interesting. I think it would be interesting, just saying, to go talk to those 27 and do another video.

Dan Weeks: I think what will be great, is we’ll be able to talk to some of those 27 …

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: … in a future podcast.

Mark Sylvester: Right. Let’s do that. Let’s have them on the show. And what we’ll do is we’ll post the video in the show so someone could see what that was.

As I said earlier, success leaves clues, right? And your eyes have gotten even better at figuring out what does the right attitude look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like?

Because the employer partners is who we’re talking about, are looking to you to deliver quality product, which is these students. Right?

Dan Weeks: Yup.

Mark Sylvester: And so it’s almost like you have this super power skill that you’ve developed just ’cause you’ve done it so many times. What we want to do is teach people how to do that, who may not normally have done that in the past. That’s what the show is about.

We’ll show them some of the videos. And it also dawned on me that the 20 that you didn’t put a bet on, still got a certification didn’t they?

Dan Weeks: Yeah, and they still had an entry into tech. It was just a different level of additional training.

Mark Sylvester: Do they get dibs on another cohort?

Dan Weeks: They can apply for the next time, but it’s all competitive.

Mark Sylvester: Oh no, I got that.

Dan Weeks: Yeah. Sure they can.

Mark Sylvester: Kind of like American Idol, they said they kept going seven years and they finally made it on the stage.

Dan Weeks: Well that’s what the employers want to here, that we’ve done this initial filtering.

Mark Sylvester: Yes.

Dan Weeks: They don’t need to because they’re not confident that they’re good at that.

Michael Specchierla: Yes, it’s definitely each one of those 50, that was the start of their hero’s journey.

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Michael Specchierla: Each one of them. And I love that you want to go and talk to the apprentices where they are now, because they’re in another chapter of that hero’s journey.

Mark Sylvester: Absolutely. And as staying with, Joseph Campbell, go look it up we’ll put a link in the show notes to hero’s journey. We know that our hero gets tapped on the shoulder and someone tapped them and said, hey there’s this program that could change your life.

Dan Weeks: Yup.

Mark Sylvester: And they took the challenge, they went on the journey. They went and encountered a dragon, so now I want to know, who is the dragon in this journey for them? And it’s steep learning curve was one of the dragons.

All new stuff is another one of the dragons. That might be the first time they’ve actually worked in an office, is another one of the dragons.

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: Right, so I think as this grows, there’s some new audiences for us. How do I get from 900 to the 100 to the 50 to the 30? What is that going to take? And those are the kind of skills that are going to help them be very successful in these careers because they’re not going to stay at this entry-level job. You’ve picked winners. They’re just starting off, but you’ve given them this, a ticket to tech, is perfect. Right?

You got a ticket, now they’re going to parlay that up the food chain. It feels like this narrative is something that the business owner, or the person that you’re dealing with at the business, this is just like oh my gosh. This is too good to be true.

Dan Weeks: I think for the business owner, they really say that after the honeymoon period of a couple of months goes by. ‘Cause when the businesses are the most excited is, they said, we put person X through the paces and they were amazing. That’s the key. Because when you ask people too early in the process you don’t have enough data …

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: … to say. And so I think the bragging occurs around month three.

Mark Sylvester: We talked in another episode that the training doesn’t stop. Certifications stop, but then it’s OJT, or, on the job training. Tell me about that.

Michael Specchierla: What’s really important in an apprenticeship model, is that you have a journeyman, or their mentor, and you have the apprentice. That guidance of the person whose job they’re trying to get enough experience to be placed at, is really, that’s the secret of apprenticeship. Is that you’re training someone under a mentor to get to a certain skill.

We know these people are not yet completely prepared. They’re prepared enough that they’re not going to do damage.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: And they’ve proven themselves that they’re trainable and they’re eager to learn. So now we’re giving them that opportunity to have that on the job training, ’cause there’s only so much you can learn out of a book, on a website, or in a class room.

Mark Sylvester: So this is then, also, part of what the partner has to invest.

Dan Weeks: Yes. What was great is one of the really forward looking IT companies, when I brought him up to speed with what we’re doing, he says, Dan I have my four journeymen, when can I get my three … my four … he said, I got my three journeymen, when can I get my three apprentices?

But he started from thinking who his journeymen would be.

Mark Sylvester: So that’s a good thing to … listener, pay attention. They want to start figuring out who the journeymen or mentor is going to be.

Do you have any guidance for them? Did you talk to them about that?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah. We recommended that one journeyman not take on more than three apprentices. That would be the maximum ratio. Ideally, a one to one, if that’s the type of culture you have. It really is up to the company to think about how big are their teams? What’s their work style?

And a three to one ratio of one journeyman to three apprentices would be our maximum. That we wouldn’t want to go further than that.

Dan Weeks: We had a key learning on this, is one of the companies has three apprentices, and they said, it’s actually less overhead than having two. Because they said the apprentices, with each other, get answers to their questions. And she was surprised that it’s actually better to get a larger group, because it’s less overhead ’cause they don’t depend on the journeyman as much.

Mark Sylvester: Right. And you didn’t realize that going in?

Dan Weeks: No. She thought it was going to be a huge overhead for the journeyman, and they realized at some point it actually went down. The demand on the journeyman.

Mark Sylvester: I want to talk to a journeyman. When we do an episode with this person in the first part of their career, I want to talk to the journeyman at the same time.

Dan Weeks: We’ll do that exact journeyman who had the three.

Mark Sylvester: Great. I think that’s going to be really key.

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: Because, again, part of what you’re doing is mitigating risk.

Dan Weeks: Yup.

Mark Sylvester: Everywhere you can. I also think about it as reducing friction.

Dan Weeks: Mh-hmm.

Mark Sylvester: Right? And that is a key piece. You know the thing I found in being a mentor is, I call it reverse mentoring. Right, is what I learned from the mentee. And there’s a value add for that person, that I’d like to get us to be able to articulate that because that’s another … I’m thinking in a work place where he says, okay guess what? And we’ve got these three new hires starting on Monday and you’re in charge. Oh, come on boss.

Yes, but, watch this video or listen to this episode of Hello Careers and you’re going to be surprised at how beneficial it’s going to be for you personally.

Dan Weeks: I think the big learning is, too many of the companies are used to interns.

Mark Sylvester: Yes.

Dan Weeks: And interns are part-time, still going to school, and to some degree, they’re kind of just getting some exposure to industries. You know?

With apprentices, these are people who are already bought in and really are trying to add as much value as soon as possible, because they’re on their career now.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: They’re not in the testing the waters phase.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: And internship’s for the benefit of the intern, really. And the company’s doing them a favor. And they’re hoping they might be able to flip it and find somewhere that seems to fit and offer them an opportunity.

And apprentice, however, is an employee, but you’re giving them the experience to become a better employee.

Mark Sylvester: And they’ve also self selected, by going through a pretty rigorous process to get to the class, then do the pre class, then do the class. And they had to actually pass the class. It wasn’t an automatic.

Dan Weeks: There was gates along the way, but that it’s exactly …

Michael Specchierla: And be selected by the business that they wanted to be brought on board.

Dan Weeks: The business didn’t pull from, I want three people, like they would do from a temp agency. No, the businesses by name said I was you, but so does three other businesses. And then the apprentice says, okay, I want company two because …

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, I’m just imagining that … I didn’t know about the videos. So now that I know what those videos are, being able to look at those and say, it’s a sellers market here, right? That’s a wonderful place to be in when you have that product, right? Because now I’m thinking the businesses … ‘Cause from a sustainability point of view, as you said earlier Michael, the product had to be amazing. Right? From a premium brand point of view, they had to be great.

Michael Specchierla: Early on, we took a lesson from one of the other grant winners up in Silicon Valley, that they went elephant hunting. And they had Cisco and Symantec as their employer partners and they had determined they wanted to have, I think it was 15 or 20 apprentices between them.

So they opened their supply where they just found 15 to 20 at their local community college that wanted to participate in this program. But when it came time to actually place them into the on the job training, there was a hiring freeze at Symantec and Cisco.

Mark Sylvester: Oh no.

Michael Specchierla: And so they were scrambling to find partners to place those apprentices at. When we heard that lesson, and it was great, Michael Bernick, he writes a column monthly for Forbes. He did a great article on that major challenge in getting apprentices up and running. And we went, uh huh, there’s are lesson learned.

And Dan and I looked at each other and said, we want one employer for each apprentice so that we’re not stuck waiting for … If somebody doesn’t want to work with us, what are we going to do?

Dan Weeks: It’s icing on the cake if we have more than one.

Mark Sylvester: And that’s a lesson across all worlds, right? We don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream in a business.

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: We don’t want to have one client, we want to have many.

Dan Weeks: Multiple streams.

Mark Sylvester: Same in investing, right? That’s was diversified investing is about. I’m not going to invest in one company, I’m going to diversify my portfolio. So it’s a similar kind of thinking.

Dan Weeks: What you just said in investing triggered something to me. Part of what I spend my time on is building up start-ups. And to me, the analogy to investing is start-ups are high risk stocks.

Mark Sylvester: Yup.

Dan Weeks: And what we’re doing with apprenticeship is bonds.

Mark Sylvester: Huh.

Dan Weeks: They’re safe bets. And when you’re thinking about economic development, you want to have a balanced strategy that you’re not all bonds and you’re not all high-risk stocks. Because nine out of ten start-ups don’t make it. But when one does, it’s giant, so you want to play that.

And what’s exciting for me, is I’m still able to be on both sides, which I think is what the local economy’s want. Don’t over bet on one or the other. Do both.

Mark Sylvester: Let’s vector, now, over to where I find the business partners. Now you had said you went to LinkedIn. You had a premium LinkedIn account.

Dan Weeks: I did.

Mark Sylvester: You figured out how to get your key words down and find exactly what you wanted. Let’s talk about the other places you could go in and recruit partners. What was the conversation at the Chamber of Commerce like?

Michael Specchierla: The Chamber of Commerce, we were able to reach out to their members who maybe were looking to expand or were looking to hire new talent. And so, it was more a business person talking to a business person. So the chambers members asking their own chambers members whether they’d like to participate.

Going to the Economic Vitality Corporation, which has its own boards. By sector. And having referrals and introductions to Dan, to have that conversation as to whether they might be a good partner.

So I think it’s both sides interviewing each other to see whether this is a good partnership.

Mark Sylvester: Well the dance, right? You said earlier.

Dan Weeks: It is the dance.

Mark Sylvester: Did you do, let’s call it a lunch and learn, did you go do presentations to these groups? Or were they one on ones?

Michael Specchierla: It was one on one, we didn’t really do … that was one of our strategies that we discussed. And we ended up not having to do it. The individual one on ones worked a lot better. And then there was also just working out of the Hot House, it’s a co-working space, as well as it has start-ups. And so we were able to identify some of the start-up companies that were looking for talent, and this seemed just like a perfect opportunity for them.

Mark Sylvester: And that’s really, I think, a unique partnership right there, of connecting start-ups and founders who are looking to expand, with apprentices looking for experience. I think the willingness to take on risk on both sides of there is a lot more accepting of a culture there, of accepting a risk.

Dan Weeks: I love that because a couple of the start-ups that we have apprentices, they both closed over a million in funding. They’re in the 10% that are going to make it. But those apprentices now have stock in a company.

Mark Sylvester: That’s the first thing I thought.

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: Right?

Dan Weeks: And so that was part of the reason they pitched. Come work for us ’cause this is our vector and then those start-ups with the million in funding were able to be picky. But some people said, some of the apprentice said, I want to go to a more established company because I’ll get more mentoring. Another one said, not me, I want to be the one who decides how they do software testing, or how they do IT and be on the ground floor. It takes a confidence for someone to jump in to say, I’m going to define the system.

Mark Sylvester: Which is one of the things you probably screened for, I’m going to guess, ego strength. Others call it confidence, certainty, those kinds of things.

Dan Weeks: And it takes all kinds because I think some of the companies, some of the larger companies, I could just see who puts that at the top of their list, versus the middle of the list.

Mark Sylvester: You had said, we’re not going for whales, or elephants. We’re going to go for that 50 person and under. Yet, in a start-up, it’s two people and under. Or, three people and under.

Dan Weeks: Well the two that we had that had the million in funding were already at the 15 level.

Mark Sylvester: Okay. But still, that’s small.

Dan Weeks: Right. And so our … One of the start-ups, very quickly our apprentices had amazing titles. Because they were early stage.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: They were director of IT, they were director of customer experience, and they were apprentices.

Mark Sylvester: Wow. And you know what, I’m sure they fill those shoes nicely.

Dan Weeks: Well, they were the perfect fit for it.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: Because a lot of what we did, is we played match.com between apprentices and employers because it was worth the time to say, if we maximize how happy both sides are, everyone wins. So we didn’t force anything in terms of matches. ‘Cause it would hurt us over the long term if both sides weren’t so excited about their placement.

Mark Sylvester: And again, it’s back to this job versus career thing. If it’s a job, I know there’s going to be turnover. If it’s a career, there’s a pretty good chance even though it’s their first high paying job, it’s a new job. I don’t want turn because that employee cost, that on boarding cost, all of that’s really expensive.

That’s another risk you’ve taken out of the equation, right? ‘Cause you’ve said, chances are they’re going to be here for a while.

Dan Weeks: Yeah, it’s a red flag to think, oh I’ll bring this person on but I don’t really want him at the end. That’s a red flag. Why would we place someone with that company?

Mark Sylvester: Wow, if I heard an employer … Did you have any employers say that? You checked them off.

Dan Weeks: Well part of it was, when we went through the type of skills they wanted, it’s like, no this isn’t a temp.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: Because some of the people that I initially talked with, I’m used to as an entrepreneur that you’re going to get no’s. So I would say, half of the companies I reached out to didn’t get it. And it was fine because their frame of reference was, oh, I already have temps doing that job.

I said, no this isn’t temps. But you just go through this process of saying, now that I know what you need, I think there’s four people who would be great. ‘Cause I know what you need.

Mark Sylvester: I’m guessing that the next batch of businesses you go for … and I’ve got to imagine now that there’s a long line of businesses that want to get into the program. And the more that this gets publicized, that’s not going to be …

That prospecting you had to do, you won’t have to do as much.

Dan Weeks: Well the bigger companies will come on in the fold now because I didn’t spend too much time on the bigger companies because once they see that it works, they’re more willing to come online. And that’s fine.

Mark Sylvester: And I think if they listened to this episode, this distinction between intern and apprentice and oh that’s a mindset shift for them. Because we don’t really have apprentice models. It’s not wide spread in these areas, that’s the whole point, right.

Michael Specchierla: Yes. Exactly. It’s defining and figuring out how do you create an apprenticeship model in an area there has never been one? That there’s really only been an internship model.

Mark Sylvester: Right. And it’s someone who’s there for Easter break or Summer break and they’re testing, you say, do I want this kinda job because my dad knew the CEO and he could get me in.

Dan Weeks: No one wants to be assigned with them overseeing three apprentices. I mean, three interns. I think what we’re finding is overseeing three apprentices is actually rewarding for both sides.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, it sounds like it. Where else might someone go? Because we’ve talked about Chambers, we’ve talked about going to the Economic Development person. We’ve talked about Work Force Development. I’m thinking again, someone in maybe a more rural community. Where are they going to go talk to? To build these business partnerships.

Michael Specchierla: Well you can always go and see if there’s any meet-ups or things like that. Developers, people in the tech industry, they’re pretty good about finding people with like interests and things like that. There may be some type of a meet-up. Maybe it’s a Linux based meet-up. Maybe it’s this other type of specific coding language or type of application.

So you can start attending those meet-ups and finding out, what are these people talking about? What are their needs? What are their desires? What are their hopes? What are their fears?

Dan Weeks: That’s a great point. In San Luis Obispo there’s a group called SoftTech, which is all the software related companies. They did a one off for us also.

Mark Sylvester: When you say one off …

Dan Weeks: They send a email to all of their members just about what we were doing about apprenticeship and take it into tech. It wasn’t us talking, it was SoftTech.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: Almost affiliate marketing.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: They were sticking their neck out for us.

Michael Specchierla: And that’s where if you find one or two business partners that are talking to you, you ask them, who else should I talk to about this? Is there other businesses or other leaders that would be interested in this? Referral is key and having a business to business referral, is better than a cold call. But that’s also where Dan’s not afraid of those cold calls and going in and talking to businesses.

Dan Weeks: Do start it up.

Michael: And the range of businesses that we thought we were going to go to between IT and traditional developer, we actually had a couple of advanced manufacturers that needed software testers. It just shows how ubiquitous tech is and how you need these types of motivated problem solvers with these types of skills that we’re looking at, cross a number of different industries.

We have a bank that we’re working with, and we have an advanced manufacturing company. We have two school districts that needed this kind of support. So there’s a real range from start-ups to school districts to banks and advanced manufacturing. There’s quite a range of businesses that you’re able to work with if you identify some common skills that they all need.

Dan Weeks: I think also we strategically realized we wanted to have at least one bank. We wanted to have at least one school district.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: We wanted to have at least one utility ’cause it gave us credibility this is real.

Mark Sylvester: I’m looking forward to a meeting where you have all of them together and we do a … ‘Cause you’re checking in two times a month, but it would be interesting to … There’s a cohort of the students, there’s also a cohort of the employers. Right? That would interesting to learn from them and what’s worked and what’s not worked in. Because you’ve spent so much time building a partnership, building a relationship with them, they want to see this program get better. And so the things that they’ve learned, so there’s probably some more interviews in your future.

Dan Weeks: Oh yes. What we’re having is a progressive dinner. Just one for the IT side and one for the software testing side. And it’s to really congratulate them on the success. Everyone has a job. But what we’re doing at the tables is we’re having companies who currently don’t have an apprentice and people from the political side, people from the Chambers of Commerce …

Mark Sylvester: Influencers.

Dan Weeks: … and then for each course they actually interact with the apprentices and then we have a video shown of the voice of an employer between each course of the meal. But what it is, then they actually directly, not just through a video, but through dialogue say, I need to get more people like this. ‘Cause it’s relationship.

Mark Sylvester: When we talked about marketing, we talked about earned media and word of mouth, and it feels like that’s a common thread in how this is worked so well, is the word of mouth. People talking to one another.

Guys, we’re at the end of this episode and I appreciate having a chance to dig into how we build a business partners, what it looks like for them with the value. Is continuing. We’re going to keep hitting that value.

Our next episode, what I want to do, is I want to talk about working with educational partners. Thanks guys.

The Hello Careers podcast explores a system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude and train for aptitude.

We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age old way of learning a skill, apprenticeship. We’ll address issues such as, where there’s a skills gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community?

If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program, or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your host Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.

Mark Sylvester: The Hello Careers podcast explores a system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude, and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age-old way of learning a skill, apprenticeship. We’ll address issues such as where there’s a skills gap is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when a major employer pulls out of your community? If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program or curious about what to do next this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your host, Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.

Well, welcome back to the show. Michael, Dan, this episode I want to continue on this thing around partnerships. When we talk about business partnerships, that’s the client, but we also have educational partnerships. Michael, just start with why do I need educational partnerships? Where do they fit into this ecosystem?

Michael Specchierla: Well, right now we’re at the start-up stage, so we’re still iterating and creating what that final product’s going to look like. The sustainability really needs to be how does this fit into your educational institutions? What can high schools, community college, colleges, adult schools, your workforce development training centers, what can they learn from the lessons that we’ve presented for them in this opportunity because you want to have those partners equal sustainability. No one entity or institution can do all the lifting on their own when you’re talking about work force and economic development.

Mark Sylvester: Right now who provides the educational service?

Michael Specchierla: Right now, the county office of education is the local education agency. What we’ve done is we’ve hired, through the grant funding, our top instructor that we had last year. We had two instructors, actually, we had three instructors that we were working with. One of them lives locally, and the reaction from the students and from the businesses and how adaptable and flexible he was in terms of providing training, that person is now on staff with us. Really proving to be invaluable in terms of delivering the training, but also working with the businesses and the apprentices that are there now, and what type of further training are they needing? Really, we’ve gotten the business intelligence of what do we need to get them in the door to the entry-level position, but, now, what’s the up-skilling that has to happen? That’s what makes this a valuable partnership with the businesses, but also provides that intelligence of, “What are the skills and training needed in an evolving sector like tech?”

Mark Sylvester: Is it the long-term vision that the community college or maybe even the high school would provide some of this training in the future, or is it outside of the traditional classroom?

Michael Specchierla: I’d like to see how each of those three could play their part. Now, in California we have a unique concept of local control, so it is up to each district and community of what they want to offer. I think presenting to them something that’s fully-formed and that businesses value helps make that choice easier where they see how this could really contribute to them. I’d like to think that some of our pre-apprenticeship programs could fit into the high schools. That’s where, I think, in our county we have a unique relationship between our local community college and our high schools in that we have this thing called dual enrollment where students at our local high schools can get high school credit as well as community college credit for a subject. It’s usually the high school teachers that are teaching those subjects. Many of those courses that they’re being offered are in things like computer science, digital media production, engineering. They’re taking something that’s a transferable class at the community college level in high school that can count towards an AA degree or a BA degree.

Mark Sylvester: So then the educational partner in that instance is also the partner who’s going to suggest students to get into a future cohort.

Michael Specchierla: Yes. We got a number of great referrals from the high school and the community college who really saw this as complimentary in getting past that experience barrier. That’s the heavy lifting that a teacher who has invested heavily in their curriculum and is doing great work in the classroom, that’s finding that business partner and going outside of the classroom, that is a big ask for a teacher that’s already working full-time to also be responsible for the experience training.

Mark Sylvester: You put a fine point on it when you said, “Get that pre-apprenticeship training.” I think it would be really interesting with this partnership to go to them and say, “We do this pre-apprenticeship thing. These are the things we’re looking at,” so they could start to connect the dots to say, “Okay, well, we’re covering grit. We’re covering resolve. We’re covering,” even as we said earlier, that entrepreneurial mindset. What does that look like? So that might not be a class, but it might be across a broad range of classes because you have this great partnership, and there is this general awareness. Listen, the cream’s going to rise to the top, as we said earlier, for only 4% are going to make it. Who are the best four? Because it feels like when they come to you as a raw recruit, so to speak, you want to be able to pick. Think of it, if there’s a thousand of them recommended that are the best of the best in the college and the high school, and then you’re saying, “Okay, I’m going to take the best of that,” oh, my gosh.

Michael Specchierla: What’s interesting about what you just said there is right now someone graduating from high school, they’ve really only got a couple of options. Say they’re at the top of their class, so they are the best, they’re competing with the other people that are the top of their program, these high-level academic programs. In our case, Cal Poly State University is one of the top three computer science programs. They reject 97% of their applicants.

Mark Sylvester: No kidding?

Michael Specchierla: Dan weeks is on the Cal Poly advisory board for computer science. Dan, tell a little more?

Dan Weeks: Yeah, so what happens is every year the demand increases, but their capability doesn’t. What ends up happening is the worst phone calls for the dean of engineering is parents of valedictorians who weren’t accepted with very high test scores.

Michael Specchierla: Apprenticeship, really, what my goal is is that why can’t that be another option for somebody who wants to pursue a career, but, also, how do you create that experience for that student who has no experience? Right now, a computer science graduating from a four year degree, they still don’t really have any experience. They’re book-smart. They’re in a boat, but you just spent four years trying to get somewhere. How do we accelerate that process when we know that the business demands on the existing educational systems exceed the supply?

Mark Sylvester: I think you’re also talking about an education gap.

Michael Specchierla: Where there’s a skills gap there is usually an education gap.

Mark Sylvester: Now I’m thinking, as an entrepreneur does, three to five years down the road. How does this look different in three years from the educator’s point of view?

Michael Specchierla: I think in three to five years we should have really strong relationships between our business partners where that dialog of what are the evolving skills demands and knowledge demands needed, that that is an ongoing dialog, so it’s not a mystery as to what are the education demands so that schools, then, have a longer lead time to adjust to their programs. We’re able to act nimbly and flexibly. That’s the gift that the County Office of Education and Dr. Brescia has given us to pilot these programs. Then, the school systems, whether it be the community college, college or high school, have that lead time to adjust their programs, allow their instructors to be able to be informed anybody them and make those local decisions.

Mark Sylvester: That gets back to what we said in several episodes now about you being a pop-up university.

Dan Weeks: I may give you a good example of that, I think. Right now, we have someone who is a software tester at a tech firm. What we’re doing in the next cohort is we’re doing coding boot camps where at the end of the training you’re at a head of household job. You’re at a job that typically pays around 80 thousand a year. What we’re looking at doing is for the software testers who now have this foundation on how to do software testing in their first apprenticeship, if they follow it up with their second apprenticeship as a full-stack developer in two and a half years we took someone who wasn’t in tech, and now has two years of work experience and all of the training as a software developer in about half the time as getting a four year degree.

Mark Sylvester: That sounds, certainly, really attractive, right?

Dan Weeks: That’s the vision. Ideally, we’d like to be able to have people in high school do the class work so they go straight into the software testing job out of high school.

Mark Sylvester: What are the numbers, and I’m sure they’re going to shock me, on how many high school students don’t go on to college?

Michael Specchierla: Well, we’ve had 20 years of really pushing towards a college for all mentality, and I’m very much a proponent that all students should be given the opportunity to go to college. Even after that 20 year influence we’ve only gone from 20% college graduates nationwide to about 30 to 40%. 50%, 60% of the students, maybe they go on to a community college or maybe only an AA. Then you have the issue of are you over-educated for the job you finally get?

Mark Sylvester: So, it sounds like-

Michael Specchierla: All education is worthwhile, but I think in a tight labor market and where you’re looking at a return on investment of what is the cost of that four-year degree, not everyone has the resources available to do that. I think taking on that large of a debt for something that you’re not sure you can payoff is something that you need to take a second look at.

Dan Weeks: About half of the people going to college don’t graduate also. The ones that do graduate are often in majors that aren’t as attractive to employers, so you really have to say, “Well, what percentage of people are going to school in high-demand majors?” That’s really a relatively small percentage.

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, both community colleges and universities are struggling with what they call a persistence rate of-

Mark Sylvester: Explain that.

Michael Specchierla: You get an enrollment class, and then you look at what your graduation rates are four to six years later, and some of them are as low as 50%. That you get people starting a higher education route, and they drop off along the way. They just do not finish what it is.

Mark Sylvester: I’m sure, as great as our numbers are right now, if we look at this over time we’ll start to see a little bit if that persistence rate. We want to have a high persistence rate. In our case it’s how long do they stay in that first job?

Dan Weeks: I think part of what Michael said, I think in the first episode, which is about Switzerland and their permeability model, it’s not, “I have to make this key decision at this point or I’m in trouble.” You have it that you can go in and out of apprenticeship over time. You can go, like, for example, someone who isn’t accepted in Cal Poly computer science maybe they take a gap year, do a coding boot camp, work for nine months, and then decide, “Now, what do I want to do? Because I now have a job that pays 80 thousand year, and if I get my four-year degree it’s 95.”

Mark Sylvester: Right. Change the motivation.

Dan Weeks: They’re not used to being able to think like that. They used think like, “Well, either I go to community college for two years, or maybe I take one of my second tier four-year choices.”

Mark Sylvester: I want to get back to the partnership. Right now you have, I think you said, three teachers. Is this curriculum licensed curriculum that you’ve gotten? For a certification, is this something you had to license, or how does that work?

Michael Specchierla: We did a couple of things from the beginning. First we were working with the CompTIA Foundation. CompTIA is the computer user, it’s a professional organization of computer users. They deal with all the certifications.

Mark Sylvester: Got it.

Michael Specchierla: Like A+ certification, and Network-plus certification.

Mark Sylvester: Okay, good.

Michael Specchierla: They’re not affiliated with any one company. They had an existing program that we adopted that was used in some of the bigger cities. We were actually one of the smallest rural/suburban areas that they launched in, but we had more applicants than some of their urban areas. We adopted their IT Futures program, which had the A+ certification. They had done some good training and good curriculum development with A+. Then, we customized with some of their existing trainers the IT training as well as the software testing training. The software testing training that is sort of an unfortified hill in that-

Mark Sylvester: Really?

Michael Specchierla: … there is not any specific curriculum around that. Usually, it’s a module or part of your computer science education. As Dan was saying earlier, most people who gradate with a computer science degree, they don’t want to be software testers. People who do get into that industry, a lot of times they’re from liberal arts backgrounds, and they fall into it because they’re good at proof reading. They’re good at quality assurance. They have a good attention to detail, or they just have that mentality of they like to break things. They sort of arbitrarily get involved in quality assurance. To be able to intentionally develop a curriculum where you teach them the procedures and protocols, but also screen for, “Are you that right person that’s going to enjoy doing software testing?” That’s a new area that we’re defining. We’re developing that curriculum and refining that curriculum of what it can look like. It’s really a hybrid of learning some scripting languages along with that quality assurance mindset of knowing the procedures and protocols necessary to create automated test schedules.

Mark Sylvester: It feels like, again, I love the way this is so circular, we went to the business, figured out what they needed. Then you went to the educators who could provide that and said, “Hmm, there’s a gap here. We’re going to need to write some of this ourselves.” I’m thinking that our listener might be thinking, “How do I get ahold of that curriculum?” What’s the plan? It feels like that might be a sustainability thing for this program, for Hello Careers, to be able to make these modules available because I’m sure there’s other communities, once they start digging in, are going to see they have exactly the same problem.

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, so we’re developing and making sure those modules are available hybrid because there’s an online content that we can deliver, but then I think it’s important if it’s truly hybrid you need to have that practicum experience. What are the meet-ups or lab-type environments that you can create where you can see whether they can perform and deliver on the content? Then tying that additionally to the apprenticeship where they have additional experience is really the true hybrid model where it’s not just online and in-person, but it’s online, in-person and experiential.

Dan Weeks: I think it’s extremely important also to let people go at the pace they’re able to learn. When you have a traditional classroom that you sit there between 9:00 and 4:00 the class goes a certain pace. The more you do a hybrid model you let everyone go at their pace, and then the employers can actually see, “Well, who did three certifications in four weeks versus one certification?” Because they went at their pace as opposed to the standard pace the educator had to say because everyone’s in the class doing the same curriculum step-by-step over the time.

Michael Specchierla: There’s no shortage online of this personalized learning and online content-

Mark Sylvester: It’s crazy, right.

Michael Specchierla: There’s almost too much of it. An individual who’s persistent and really battle-hardened can slough their way through that and figure it out, but most people quit very quickly. How you create that support structure through meet-ups and that in-person intervention, and the intervention can be to recover someone or to accelerate someone. That’s really where the business partnerships come in that help give that abstract content the context of how it’s going to work in the business.

Mark Sylvester: We know that once they get hired you’re going to check in with them every two weeks. In the 14 week period how many times does the business person come in and check in on the cohort?

Dan Weeks: In the first eight weeks we had businesses come in that had both IT and software testing people, both, to explain what the difference was.

Mark Sylvester: Oh, good.

Dan Weeks: It wasn’t biased of which direction. That’s what we did in the first eight weeks, is just to help people and a non-biased way say, “What path should you go?” Then, when we’re in the final six weeks of training we had three employers per week coming in pitching.

Mark Sylvester: Oh, right, because we know there’s a finite resource of these 27.

Dan Weeks: Yeah, so it was almost like pitching to a VC.

Mark Sylvester: How did they do?

Dan Weeks: Most of them did really well. The ones that were “salesy” didn’t do well at all.

Mark Sylvester: Give me an example of “salesy”.

Dan Weeks: They were acting as if they were selling to a potential customer their product as opposed to saying, “Here’s what’s great about working for our company and the challenges you’ll get.” For example, one of the companies when they did their interviews, they were too easy. Another company really put the people through the paces, and the one who put them through the paces, everyone wanted to work for because that person assumed, “You know a lot, and I’m going to see just how far I can go with you.” When the company was really easy it’s like, “They were assuming that we didn’t know anything.” It was interesting, they wanted to be pushed because they just went through this intense 14 week program. They want to show off a bit.

Mark Sylvester: Do you think that that learning is going to affect how you coach these companies when they come in to pitch?

Dan Weeks: Oh, we did, because one of the companies-

Mark Sylvester: Oh, you did already?

Dan Weeks: Yeah, one of the companies got a bunch of people not saying yes to them, and I said, “Well, I’ll tell you why.” Then they came back and talked to people they hadn’t before, and they completely listened, and then they got three people on the second round.

Mark Sylvester: I’m interviewing a marketing guy on how do we cut through the clutter. There’s so many messages that we deal with every day. He said, “You have to rethink.” He says, “People don’t buy value. They buy values.” It made me think that you’re screening for attitude, which is all value-based. It’s 100% value-based, and that it’s almost like you want to screen those business partners for attitude as well so that you’ve got that good match, right? It’s like, “I know that that particular work environment is going to attract a certain kind of student,” whatever that means. The values that they place on it, this is going to be perfect because it’s going to be a value match.

When we worked with TED originally, they said, “When you meet at TED..” Because you’re meeting some amazing people, it’s TED, that you might have skills in common and expertise in common, you might have all these things in common. But what he wanted to do was make sure that the relationship that you built at TED lasted beyond the four days. He says, “You have to have common values.” That was 15 years ago that I got schooled by him to say, “That’s what’s important. That’s what makes our tribe different.”

I think that’s what makes this program different. It doesn’t say train for attitudes, no, it’s screen attitude first. That’s the first thing you do to get us from the 900 down to our 100. I want to understand what the ongoing, the second year, the third year, and I know you’re not there yet, but what do you think that’s going to look like for the students? How can you work with the educational partners to help those students? Because they’re kind of still students in the second year, I’m going to guess.

Michael Specchierla: I think the biggest change that we’re looking forward to is for the first cohort, because we had no credibility, we had to do a lot more front-loading of the training to get them to that billable hours. In discussions with many of the businesses now we’re trying to figure out how we can more blend that so that we can get people more quickly into the experience so that they’re not so much a lot of abstract thought, a lot of content delivery up front, and then, all right, “Now, go.” You have the fire hose, drunk as much as you can, set them loose and give them the experience. How we can marry those more closely together by chunking the knowledge so it’s just-in-time knowledge, give them the experience, just-in-time knowledge, give them the experience. Those are the conversations we’re having with businesses now of how do you do that without making it disruptive to your clients and your customers and your work environment?

Mark Sylvester: You said in an earlier episode that, possibly, it’s not just one cohort, but there are four cohorts that are staggered across time.

Michael Specchierla: Yeah.

Dan Weeks: I think what the businesses are saying is if we’re going to have a shorter duration for the first set of classes, let us be involved who’s even admitted into the program, which, in the first cohort they wouldn’t want to be involved that early. This time they’re saying, “Let us be involved in the early step of who we think should be in.”

Mark Sylvester: Okay, what would that look like if I’ve got my 100 on video, and now let the employers go in help where are we going to put the bets on the 50?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, so it looks more like a-

Mark Sylvester: Because they didn’t do that.

Michael Specchierla: It’s more of a clearing house approach where we can help vet and screen and everyone plays a role in deciding who’s our best bets moving forward.

Mark Sylvester: There’s probably an opportunity for someone who’s listening to this show to actually write something for you, a web-based something that would work really well. You could figure out, you knew what the criteria was on what makes a potentially great employee, starts with they interviewed really well, they want through all … You guys know it because you’ve now done this. You know what to look for, and you could tell.

Michael Specchierla: If you look at a pre-apprenticeship and an apprenticeship it’s really a one-year hiring process. What does that one-year hiring process look like so that at the end of the apprenticeship when you’ve invested some of your time in there … As a business, you’re not obligated to take on that person at the end of one year, but when you look at the investments you’ve made wouldn’t you want to hire that person?

Mark Sylvester: Of course.

Michael Specchierla: That’s where I think it’s a return on investment. We’re taking some of the risk out for the businesses so they have this one-year on-boarding time. Presumably, with all apprentices you’re getting a loyalty factor too.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: These are all returns on investments and benefits for the employer and the employee. Even if the apprentice isn’t selected to continue in that company, they at least walk away with one year of experience that’s transferable to a different company. Especially in our case where we have a multi-employer program, one of their competitors may want to pick them up. That hiring process is really a one-year approach of how we can onboard an employee.

Mark Sylvester: Bringing it back to educational partners, one of the things that you said earlier was this organization can be very nimble and be very responsive as things change. We know that cloud computing has changed everything, so we’re teaching stuff about clouds. We know with recent events that data security and all that that implies is epically huge program to be solved. Yet, you also said, Michael, in an earlier episode that curriculum development, because of whatever reasons, bureaucracy and et cetera, just takes a long time. Is there a role for Hello Careers in an early, not warning, but you see things faster than other people, and because you’ve got this really great relationship with the educational partners they don’t have to drink from the fire hose? They can say, “Oh, these are the 10 things we’re seeing. We’re going to take care of it in a pop-up university, but you know what? If you picked one, two and three you could get the 101 version of that thing done so that when they get to us we’re not having to do the really fundamental work.” Am I on the right path?

Michael Specchierla: Yes. It’s more of feeding hungry fish.

Mark Sylvester: Back to the fish.

Michael Specchierla: That which teachers and institutions can take on those. How much weight can they lift? With on-the-job training that’s your most nimble type of training. It’s happening in real time. It’s dynamic, and the learning is there. By having the journeymen there to help unpack it and help make sure that there really was, that the learning sticks, that the experience sticks, that is your most nimble and dynamic type of curriculum delivery right there.

Dan Weeks: It seems relevant also. The challenge when you do that 14 weeks just upfront they’re not sure which is and is not relevant once they get on the job. If it’s during the on-the-job training, and they’re partnering with their journeymen it’s very clear, “I need to know more of this because it’s going to help me move up in this company.”

Mark Sylvester: Exactly. It feels like you have put in really tight communication loops throughout the entire process.

Dan Weeks: Like the apprentices, Michael found this software called Work Hands. It’s from an iPhone app. They just type in which of their work processes they’re doing right now so we’re able to track in an easy way.

Mark Sylvester: Really?

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, it was kind of fun using that app in that right now when we first got onto it it was all for the traditional trades. It was a lot of plumbers, electricians, laborers, mechanics, auto people. I had to request from the company to get IT specialist and software tester on there. This is a start-up company in itself too, because normally a lot of apprenticeships, they track their attendance and their work process hours all by paper. I wanted to make this much more easy so that the apprentice can track their hours, report it to their supervisor, get them approved, and I can see what their hours are on an ongoing basis, and putting the pressure on the apprentice to report what they’re doing. The software, the company that’s working with this they were real excited to have IT and software testers on there.

Mark Sylvester: Oh, great.

Michael Specchierla: I’ve been teasing them that, “So, when are you going to get your apprentices?”

Mark Sylvester: We’ll make a link to that. It’s Work Hands?

Michael Specchierla: Work Hands, really great app.

Mark Sylvester: We’ll put a link in the show notes because that’s, again, part of what makes this work is all the partnerships you have built, whether it’s a technology partnership that, you know, “We’ve got to have to make it work,” human partnerships, all of that, so we keep hitting that thread. You guys, we’re, again, at the end of another episode. We’re just blowing through these. It is so great. What we’re going to do next, our next episode, want to talk about working with public sector partners. It’s very different when we start talking about politics and public sector and all of that. Until next time, thanks, guys.

Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community and say hello to new careers and good-bye to low-wage jobs? For more episodes visit hellocareers.org, or send us a note to hellocareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region. Til next time, I’m Mark Sylvester with Hello Careers.

Mark Sylvester: The Hello Careers podcast explores a system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude and train for aptitude.

Mark Sylvester: We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age old way of learning a skill, apprenticeship. We’ll address issues such as, “Where there’s a skills gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community?” If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for.

Mark Sylvester: I’m your host Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.

Mark Sylvester: Welcome back to the show. I’m here with Michael and Dan and continuing to talk about partnership. So we’ve talked about business partners. We’ve talked about educational partners. Now we’re going to talk about the public sector partners. Because the only reason this worked at all was because we had great partnerships. Yet because we’re talking about schools and government, we need to have those public sector partners. And I’m curious … It’s one of those chicken and the eggs, which came first? Which partnership was the first one you needed to set up in this before we get into this? Was it public sector? Was it schools? Was it business?

Michael Specchierla: I went toward business first.

Mark Sylvester: Okay.

Michael Specchierla: Because that’s really the end customer. And when we’re talking about these public/private partnerships, you have a lot of these nonprofit entities that … San Luis was a messy space in that we have a lot of nonprofits. And so with that many nonprofits all going and asking something from business, if it’s not coordinated or if it’s not relationships, you’re just another ask to the business. And so I was very conscious of not positioning myself with the businesses of asking for money. But I was going to them to give something to them. And I already had funding.

Michael Specchierla: So I was sensitive to the fact there were already nonprofits already engaged with businesses, maybe had their own partnerships with businesses. And I didn’t want to be seen as a competitor for those resources.

Mark Sylvester: So that colored the conversation in what way?

Michael Specchierla: Just going about and presenting myself as someone who they wanted to partner with.

Mark Sylvester: So reframed it?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah. Since I already had funding, I was going to go out and do this, and would they like to work with me to do this. So making sure that we had a common cause that we’re both focused on the same thing. Because each of these nonprofits has their own goals and objectives.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: So it’s got to be good alignment.

Mark Sylvester: So how much longer after the grant did you go out and start building the partnership?

Michael Specchierla: Well we already had a previous relationship through previous grants. And at least being knowledgeable of each other and at least looking at each other in the eye and saying, “We want to work together. But we have to figure out how to work together.” And so that’s still the ongoing conversation with a lot of nonprofits and government agencies of, we know we should be working together, but how do we do that effectively? And so the apprenticeship strategy was really our pilot and case study of, “Well. Let’s try it with this. How do we work together in this one so we can learn better how to work together.” So again, building relationship, building trust.

Mark Sylvester: And as it turns out, this has turned into the big one. You don’t have room to do another one right? Because we’re doing this one.

Michael Specchierla: Yes. And just the way we went about this apprenticeship, it really built a just good relationship with the other entities, that they saw our entrepreneurial way of doing things and the way we were marketing things, that was a win-win for them. That they recognized that, “Oh. I’m government. And I’m here to help you,” isn’t really what a business wants to hear. But being able to have someone like Dan Weeks says, a business liaison and going out and getting that business intell and building that relationship with the company. And then coming back with that information and sitting down at a table and saying, “Who’s the best referral for this? What part can each of us play in getting this done is really important.”

Michael Specchierla: So in that case, one of our strongest partners is the Workforce Development Board. They have completely separate funding through what’s called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. That’s a federal program. And they’re tasked with often times in other regions depending on their size, but because we’re a small size, they’re often the conveners of a lot of these things. So they really welcomed us as assisting with convening business and employers and helping to fill those education and training gaps.

Michael Specchierla: And then Chamber of Commerce, they’re faced with what is their relevance in the 21st century with the Internet and the way that you can already work together and refer online? What’s your value to members? Is it just having socials and networking events? Or is there something else? So they’re recognizing a value of what’s their role in working with us and creating a talent pipeline.

Mark Sylvester: And value’s different along the food chain right? For a membership organization, what’s the value we’re giving back. But to a politician, what’s the value?

Michael Specchierla: Well in our region, we have Representative Jordan Cunningham from the State of California Assembly. And when he was running for office, he went out and asked businesses, “What’s keeping you up at night?” And what he heard was a resounding, “We can’t find the skilled talent we need to grow.” And so he was a natural partner. And he’s been a very strong supporter of career technical education. He’s actually got a bill in the Assembly right now to continue funding for the CTE Incentive grant that’ll be expiring in 2019. And additionally, he’s willing to reach across the aisle to Democrats. So Darrell Steinberg, Democrat, had previously written the California Career Pathways Trust grant. And this one, Jordan Cunningham reached across the aisle and let a Democrat take the lead on that. He’s very bipartisan. He says, “It doesn’t matter who passes it. I just want this to happen because it’s right.”

Mark Sylvester: Is education a partisan issue?

Michael Specchierla: It shouldn’t be, except we are in partisan times. If it’s about jobs and that’s where I think career technical education cuts across, then it’s about jobs and opportunity, that’s a non-partisan issue.

Mark Sylvester: Right. So helping them frame that, you going to them with that CTE … we’ll make sure that acronym is listed in our glossary. But going to them with that as the lead gets their support?

Michael Specchierla: Yes. And apprenticeship is one of those topics that it sounds good to everyone, it looks like it’s a good program, but you got to be able to see it and make it happen. So that’s where, I think, our successes so far have gotten people to take a second look at that and want to show their support and see how we can scale this and expand it so we can really see just how far can we go with apprenticeship.

Mark Sylvester: Well that’s also why we’re doing the show.

Dan Weeks: Right. I think there aren’t near enough success stories on apprenticeship right now because I think a lot of it is process issues. And we’re talking a lot about process.

Mark Sylvester: Give me an example.

Dan Weeks: Well you know Michael talked in a previous session about approaching apprenticeship, embedding the whole program like getting some big companies to do apprenticeship. Or, having an apprenticeship that’s creating people, like in cybersecurity where the employers really want people with 10 years of experience of cybersecurity, but you’re pushing people who have a bootcamp amount of cybersecurity. So I think the more there are successes of, “Here’s a group of people that now have careers and this is how we’re going to scale the better.” And I think what we’re talking about in this series isn’t tied to California, it applies nationwide. It’s just as I said entrepreneurial mindset toward apprenticeship and it doesn’t have to be tech apprenticeship.

But when I talk to Jordan Cunningham, the Assemblyman that Michael was referencing, he didn’t have examples in his mind of apprenticeship that when he knows this is in his District, he goes, “Tell me more. I’ll help you any way I can because I need to help you tell the story because as a politician, I need stories of success as opposed to potential success.”

Mark Sylvester: So the person who’s listening who has either they’ve gotten a grant, they’re just getting started or thinking about getting a grant, how do they … I mean you know these guys. Let’s say I don’t know my local politician. How do reach out and start that conversation? If you know you need that partnership, how do you do that?

Michael Specchierla: Well I think you just need to make the ask. You need to go and present your case and ask them how they’d like to partner. Your Chambers of Commerce represent small business. Make sure they understand what would be the return on investment for their members. Same thing with a politician or other community leaders or regional leaders is, “What’s the return on investment? How will this benefit economic development and workforce development of lowering under employment, creating jobs, and …” You know, the coast of California, the high cost of living, this is a struggle for all coastal communities of how are we going to sustain our populations? Is it only for retired people? Or people moving out of the urban centers into rural, suburban coastline communities? Or, can these young people who live there now afford to stay there?

Mark Sylvester: And that’s what we’re doing?

Dan Weeks: Correct. I was lobbying with Comptia. We talked about Comptia earlier. They’re the largest IT Trade association in DC that we talked to Members of Congress tied to a Bill called the Chance and Tech Act. And that’s accelerating tech apprenticeship. And I found in every group we with talked with, no one was against apprenticeship. It was just more, “Show me where it’s working and then we’ll figure out how much to fund it.” It wasn’t whether it’s a good or bad idea. It’s just more I know the ROI like Michael was saying, the more, “Well this is easy to put X amount of dollars on it because it pays for itself in Y amount of time.” Because no one’s going to argue that it’s not a good idea. They’re just going to say, “Well. Is it the most prudent use of funds with all the other uses of funds that politicians struggle with?”

Mark Sylvester: So did you have to have this political partnership before you did the grant? Did that help you or influence you at all?

Michael Specchierla: Yes. Support letters for the grants are very important. And I think particularly in our case, where if we were looking at the economic development data, it wouldn’t show that there was a demand or need in the tech sector. Having businesses as well as community and regional leaders and political leaders show their support really is better than lagging economic data. That’s a key point in all of our grants that we pursue.

Mark Sylvester: We’re looking in the rear view mirror here a little bit but you have to have thought that this was going to be successful in this way so you could tell that story so those people would support you before you could get the grant, before you could do what you had to do?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah. It’s kind of a chicken or egg argument.

Dan Weeks: But I think that’s what Michael did though is he had the vision of what was needed. And he pushed to get a grant even though it was new. But I think once people hear about it, they say, “That’s a great idea. We should have done that a while ago.”

Mark Sylvester: So I’m thinking of the person who’s sitting in a County Office of Education now getting excited about this. Where do they start? I mean this idea of having a vision like you just said. You’ve got this vision. So maybe they cobble together a vision now after hearing this, “Hey. We could actually do this.” And then start doing the blocking and tackling that it takes to build a coalition of people. How long do you think that takes?

Michael Specchierla: Well I began, this is my third year, and it started with the consortium that we built up for the California Career Pathways Trust grant. And so you may initially get a group together that are only united in that they’re looking for grant funding. But then you need to build upon that by, “Now we’re together because that was successful and we need to get to the next stage.” So success breeds success.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah it does.

Michael Specchierla: And you need some initial funding to start the whole process. But you really need to be thinking of how it’s a regional process and that it’s about creating collective impact not just one siloed one-off approach. That it has to be that regional collective impact that really … People in economic and workforce development then will take notice of how we’re all doing the heavy lifting together.

Mark Sylvester: It was great how you called back to another episode there. And it wasn’t just like one business partner. I need 20 or 30 or 40 or 50. And here, it’s, “I don’t need one public sector partner. I need all of them.” I mean all of the ones that have a vested interest in this being successful, you need them all at the table. And so again back to the chicken and egg. But if you’re having that conversation with everyone, you know they’re all talking to everyone themselves. I mean, “Has Michael been here to take you to lunch yet?” “Yeah, Michael wants to take me to coffee.” “Oh well, this is what he’s going to want to talk about.” So it gets a bit of a buzz a that.

You said it was regional. What do they say, “All politics are local?” So where’s the Mayor and the City Council and the Board or Supervisors and all of those folks in this mix?

Michael Specchierla: We have a small region in San Luis Obispo in that we go from Santa Maria which is northern Santa Barbara up to border of Monterey. So each different area is in a different stage with where they’re at with regionalism. San Luis Obispo City is probably more engaged just because that’s where the more volume of business is. And so you have City Supervisors, you have the Economic Vitality Corporation, you have the Chamber of Commerce. They’re highly engaged. And that’s also where the Workforce Development Board is placed. Cuesta College is there. Cal Poly is there. So you have more energy coming out of there.

But then you have other areas where you have very strong Chambers of Commerce such as Pasa Robles or Atascadero or Templeton. Those Chambers of Commerce are very highly engaged because they recognize, “Where is our talent pipeline?” This idea of future careers, locally grown really resonates with people.

Mark Sylvester: Is that another T-shirt for us?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah. It’s a good tag line.

Mark Sylvester: Future careers locally grown. I love that.

I’m thinking of the politicians who want to get on the right side of this. I’m curious, are they calling you and saying, “How can I help?” Has that happened yet?

Michael Specchierla: I’m a little more proactive in that if we’re having … we have the Regional Skills USA, it’s a student run organization where the students are able to compete in different events and things like that. Give the politicians a braggable. So invite Jordan Cunningham to speak before the couple hundred students that are competing in front of businesses for all different things, from ranging from welding to 3-D design to elevator pitch contests and things like that. They love being at that especially if you know that politician has already voiced a support towards career technical education or apprenticeship or something like that. So really give those people a braggable that they can bring back and take some credit for.

Dan Weeks: I think our partnership with the EVC is key in this also. Because the EVC invited me to a meeting where our Congressman was talking to advanced manufacturing companies. But I wouldn’t have been at that meeting if the EVC didn’t invite me to it. And what ended up happening after that meeting with follow through, we’re going to get 20 apprentices in advanced manufacturing with just one of the companies.

But it was because our relationship with the EVC said, “Dan or Michael. One of you needs to be at this meeting.” And they opened the door for us. And that was huge.

Mark Sylvester: Well we know that’s the power of partnership and the word-of-mouth thing. So everybody knows what you’re doing. Who you need to meet, where the mission is, and they’re looking out for you.

Dan Weeks: They’re looking out for each other.

Mark Sylvester: Exactly. Got your back, right?

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: Got your back.

Michael Specchierla: The Economic Vitality Corporation, they’re really the leaders at this because most of the City governments, all have contributed funding towards them as a nonprofit to take that role of representing business and being the champion of business. And they recognized that thinking regionally and engaging the Workforce Development Board, the community college, Cal Poly and K-12 was worth their effort.

Michael Specchierla: So they actually pursued a separate grant just to have us as a taskforce. All four of those groups meeting together regularly to really talk about, “What are all of our missions? Where do we align? How should we go about and engage business without overtaxing them?” So we were actually being intentional about it rather than unintentional and random about how we wanted to be strategic and respond to what the business needs were.

Michael Specchierla: And what we found was when we represented ourselves as a common cause, that we were all in discussions with each other, businesses were much more responsive. They knew that if they talked to the community college and it wasn’t the right fit, they would refer to the Workforce Development Board or to K-12. Who was the right partner to help out with whatever that business problem was?

Mark Sylvester: And again because you have all of these relationships in play, those are easy calls to make, right?

Michael Specchierla: Yes.

Mark Sylvester: Tell me about how it would help you possibly to have relationships with adjacent regions to us? So I’m thinking about this program. I’m going to put in this program in my community. How wide a spread do I think about?

Michael Specchierla: Well I think you need to think about your labor market. In our case, we have a strong relationship with one region, Santa Maria Valley, which is northern Santa Barbara. It’s the largest city within Santa Barbara County but it’s not in San Luis Obispo, but it’s sort of a bedroom community for San Luis Obispo. So they need to be included in that region with us. And a lot of people have talked about it. We’ve recognized it. But how do you actually coordinate that? It’s just one more piece of the puzzle you have to manage but you have to be active in wanting to include them and not by default, go into these silos.

Mark Sylvester: Exactly. So it’s a logical … I’m just thinking, what happens if there were two of these and two of these Hello Career efforts in a region? You wouldn’t want that, right?

Michael Specchierla: Unless you had that conversation of, “What’s the overlap? And why we want to compete?” It has to be a non-competitive … You can’t be competitive about this. It has to be that all boats will rise with the highest tide, that we can work together so that we can both succeed rather than competing for finite resources.

Dan Weeks: You could have a Hello Careers for hospitality or tourism separate from a Hello Careers for tech and advance manufacturing because there’s not a lot of overlap. If you have multiple organizations and they’re not overlapping in their target customer, I think that’s fine. I think you’ll have more momentum.

Mark Sylvester: First we just got to get one everywhere, right?

Dan Weeks: At least one.

Mark Sylvester: So we’re doing that. One of the things that we talked about case studies being … how important case studies were and how good it was for you to invite a politician to an event so they’ve got a braggable as you said. We had a nonprofit at my software company and it was at risk kids after school would come in and learn how to do computer animation. And it was project based so we would do — we’re in Santa Barbara — so we would do something marine related and we’d create a big animation for that.

Mark Sylvester: But then I had them present to the Mayor and the City Council when they were done. So they would come, the Mayor and City Council and the citizens would come to the office and see what the kids had done. And that was such a big deal for the kids. And I hadn’t ever thought about it being a big deal for he Mayor and the City Council. But the kids were like, “Wow. This is important enough for leadership to come and see what we’re doing.”

Michael Specchierla: We did that same approach with the first cohort and the apprenticeship that we invited elected officials, Jordan Cunningham and other community leaders to see what was going on. And it was reciprocal in that the students appreciated that we were showing them off but also engaging these leaders to show them what we were doing.

Michael Specchierla: But it was also the leaders were happy that we were including them as partners within it. That they could say, “This is what’s happening in my constituent with my constituents. This is what’s happening in my area. I can talk about this when I go back to Sacramento. Or I can talk about this at a City Council meeting.”

Mark Sylvester: I was just thinking that they can’t wait to go tell that story, right? And their role in it.

Dan Weeks: What was nice is when they saw … So Jordan Cunningham spoke to the class when we were still 50. And he told them, “You are the future. This is the future of what’s going to happen for a large number of people that isn’t directly the four year degree path.”

Dan Weeks: So I saw him a couple of weeks ago and I said, “By the way Jordan, do you know what happened with that group?” And he goes, “No.” And then I told him. He goes, “Wow. How can I help you in any way I can?” And so then we met with his District focal point. And now he’s going to do videos for us. He’ll do anything because now it’s success story. But it was follow-up to something that he did earlier when it was more just concept.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: But he loves to hear, “It was successful” in his area. And now it’s, “How can I help you?”

Mark Sylvester: Back to a comment you made earlier Michael in an earlier episode how important that first set of products were, those students.

Michael Specchierla: You need to have quality. It has to be high quality your first prototype, you’ve got to really think about it.

Mark Sylvester: You get one shot.

Dan Weeks: Even if you hold the quantity down because the method Michael and I had, we’d rather have a smaller group of great people than a larger group that’s a mixture of okay and great people. Because that first cohort is our brand.

Mark Sylvester: Exactly. And everybody got placed. So far, you’re doing really well which is why we’re doing this show so we can capture this right now, “What are all of these steps? What are all the things you need to do?”

I was reminded though with that after school program, we went to do one of the presentations, one of the years. And I show up and one of my students had long hair, brilliant kid but just didn’t fit in to the normal world but he fit into our world perfectly. And here we’re going to present. It’s the year of the ocean. We’re at the museum. This is a whole thing on the Santa Barbara channel. It’s an animation. It’s fantastic. He shows up and he’s got hair shorter than me. And I said, “What’s the deal?” And he goes, “I think they’ll take me more seriously.” And I was like, “Okay. I’m done.” This whole year was worth it just to have him have that realization at 16 to be taken seriously.

Dan Weeks: That’s wonderful.

Mark Sylvester: That’s one of the reasons I think we all love education. But then we also have to put numbers to things to be able to get funding, continue to get support, continue to have the businesses going, “Yep. Our business is growing. Thank you. We filled those jobs. We can meet those orders. We can do all of that.” Which brings me to another entity which we’ll find in a lot of communities which is an Economic Forecast Project.

Michael Specchierla: Yes.

Mark Sylvester: So what’s the relationship that you have with the Economic Forecast Project? Because they’re different in every region but why don’t you tell us about the one here and what that relationship looks like?

Michael Specchierla: So the Central Coast Economic Forecast?

Mark Sylvester: Sure.

Michael Specchierla: So that’s an annual event that’s put on by the EVC. And the relationship there. It’s similar to the EDD data, that it can only forecast so much. The ask always is, “How are you all working together regionally to solve your problems and what is your pipeline?” Dan?

Mark Sylvester: So I’m curious for next year, a year from now once you have some data under your belt, I think you’re going to be a line item in that report?

Dan Weeks: I think we will because I think people like [inaudible 00:27:05] in our local EVC hear our numbers because we’re very numeric driven. And we’re transparent about numbers as opposed to intent.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: I was mentioning at a meeting I was at earlier in the week, too many nonprofits focus are in energy extended as opposed to impact. And we’re about impact and measured impact.

Mark Sylvester: And also because you’re an entrepreneur sitting at the table, right?

Dan Weeks: Yeah.

Mark Sylvester: Which is part of why this thing is working so well.

Dan Weeks: Effort without impact is just effort.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah exactly. You want to make a difference right? And we’re making a difference in that student life. We’re making a difference I think in the teacher that knows they’re making a difference? Like they’re contributing something, right? Then think of the impact we have on the journeymen. We’ve uncovered that in an episode, how important that is. Because that journeymen, you’ve just built job loyalty for them because they just love being there and helping to promote their brand to someone new.

Dan Weeks: They kind of feel like they’re cloning themself. I mean when you think about it, the idea of a journeyman is for the employers it’s like, “Who do you wish you could just snap your finger and have two of? We’ll let’s put some people underneath them and make it a conscious effort to create more of the things that made that person excel in your company.”

Mark Sylvester: So the impact. There’s so many different ways you can measure impact as well as just raw gross product and numbers that you could put out and say, “Listen. We know there’s a billion dollar hole.” We’ve talked about that in the first episode. So what is this project doing to get us out of that hole a bit and how do we project that?

Mark Sylvester: Guys, this has been great. Again another episode has flown by as we talk about partners and the various different types of partners.

Mark Sylvester: What I want to talk about in our next show is I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of the administration of this. Like how do we do this so that the person who’s been listening to these episodes, understands all the value that we’ve been talking about, the benefits that we’ve been talking about. But, like for the nuts and bolts of just getting it done. Because it might be that it’s just a one person shop. And so their first job is to go find their Dan. Or go find their Michael.

Mark Sylvester: So guys, thank you so much and we’ll see you at the next show.

Mark Sylvester: Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community and say hello to new careers and goodbye to low wage jobs? For more episodes, visit HelloCareers.org. Or send us a note to Podcast@HelloCareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region.

Mark Sylvester: Till next time, I’m Mark Sylvester with Hello Careers.

Mark Sylvester: The Hello Careers podcast explores the system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude, and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships, and earn public support for an age old way of learning a skill; apprenticeship.

Mark Sylvester: We’ll address issues such as where there’s a skills gap, is there and education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community? If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program, or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your host, Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started, and talk with the team.

Mark Sylvester: Well welcome back to the show everybody. Michael and Dan, this episode. I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of just administering the program. So that we give the listener a sense of what are the things they need to do. So they’ve either got the grant or they’re writing the grant, we’ve talked about partnership, we’ve talked about all of those things, but there’s just some, it’s not the sexy stuff, right. But it’s the systems, it’s the rigor, it’s the how you get this done. And I also want to get into, we’ve talked about partners, but I want to talk about partner management as well. There’s a lot of work to pull this off. So let’s kind of dig into that. Why don’t we start with like, what are the main tasks. Let’s take a day or a week, what are the tasks you guys have to spend your time on?

Michael Specchierla: So the care and feeding of apprenticeship.

Mark Sylvester: Oh there you go. There’s my title.

Michael Specchierla: Because we have a registered apprenticeship program with the state of California, we need to work with the division of apprenticeships standards.

Mark Sylvester: Okay.

Michael Specchierla: And what’s been particularly interesting and fun with this is, it’s dominated by union trades right now. So our innovative apprenticeship has thrown a few curve balls. And my response always when I talk to them is, well, you partnered with the community college chancellor’s office to create an innovative grant. This is what you get when you have an innovative grant. It’s not going to fit neatly in a box.

Mark Sylvester: Got it.

Michael Specchierla: But the process notwithstanding, the process is still really good. Because the whole strategy and approach of engaging businesses, developing what they call work processes, which are basically detailed lists of what exactly do you do when you’re on the job. Identifying competencies. And how many hours it would take you to get to those competencies. So that you can establish, how long does this apprenticeship need to be, is it a one year program, is it a two year program? How many classroom hours would you have to take? So identifying just those buckets right there. Because an apprenticeship has to have a minimum of 144 hours a year of classroom time. And a minimum of 2008 hours.

Michael Specchierla: So a one-year apprenticeship in California is kind of the minimum you can do. And there’s some other lists too. There’s this thing called the O*NET codes. And those are like when you go to the bureau of labor statistics, and you look at job profiles and things. It’s the same thing. There’s a whole list of these things. And job families and-

Mark Sylvester: Like NAICS codes for businesses.

Michael Specchierla: Yes. And your apprentice program should have an O*NET code that’s on, that’s an apprentice-able occupation. We of course push the envelope on that and quality assurance software testing was not previously on the list. But we petitioned to have it put on the list. So you’re working with a bureaucracy. They have their rules, they have their ways of doing things, and if you’re doing an innovative apprenticeship program you’re going to be telling them things, well, can we do it this way too.

Mark Sylvester: So now, Dan, everything he just said is stuff you don’t like to do?

Dan Weeks: Right. Because it’s a bureaucracy part. And what I’m thinking is if it’s a guy like the entrepreneur, who’s setting up this plan. They need to go find someone like Michael who is not scared by the word compliance, and governance. And those kind of things. Because that’s a fact of life in what you’re doing.

Michael Specchierla: And it’s no different from starting a small business. That you still have to understand you’re going to be dealing with the office of trademark, and you’re going to be dealing with taxes, and the IRS. And your state and local governance, and licensing, et cetera. So there’s just that due diligence that you have to do. And really where it comes into, if Dan’s out there, working with the business, to understand what the needs are, you then have to translate it back into what these forms are requiring from you. That you’re going to submit an application, to the division of apprenticeship standards. Identifying how many hours is the classroom instruction. How many hours is the apprenticeship. What are the work processes that you’ve got. What are the companies that you’re working with.

And then there’s some forms that have to be filled out between you, the employer, and the apprentices, agreeing to what the wage progression is going to be. And how many hours it’s going to be, and are there going to be benefits involved, and you agree to this length of an apprenticeship. And then there’s the rules and the regulations for how you’re going to run the apprenticeship. And that’s just sort of some belts and suspenders right there, of making sure that you’re creating a new program, so what are you going to do if something goes wrong? Do you have a process, for resolving whatever that conflict is, or that misunderstanding, or that new situation.

And that’s where also, there’s an apprenticeship committee, that’ll have businesses on there, as well as education members, so that you have a forum to be able to process these things. And vet these things. And if you do want to approve new standards, or change or modify standards, you have a process for doing that.

Mark Sylvester: When you become a, it’s registered apprentice program. It’s the program itself is registered, or the individual business is registered? Or how does that work?

Michael Specchierla: All of those. So in our case we’re a multi-employer registered apprenticeship program.

Mark Sylvester: Got it.

Michael Specchierla: Need to have both a local education agency.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Michael Specchierla: And the local education agency could be a community college. Or it could be a county office of education. So San Luis Obispo county office of education is the local education agency, sponsoring the program. And then we have businesses, that are part of our business partners, and they can choose to be on the advisory committee or not. So we’ve got three members of the business that want to be on the advisory committee. All the others still have an open invitation, if they’d like to join us they can. And together, we work to run and administer the apprenticeship program.

Michael Specchierla: I’m the administrator. And then I have my staff. Which is Dan Weeks, and then an assistant. Because there’s paperwork.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Michael Specchierla: You have to keep track of attendance, you have to keep track of the work processes, that’s where that work hands out, helps make things a little bit easier that way. For the grants. You have to make sure that you’ve established your quarterly reports. And those are both budget quarterly reports, as well as program outcomes. And all these California apprenticeship initiatives, are all tied to what’s called strong workforce metrics. And those are all tied to labor market indicators. So they want to see, you know, what’s the effect we’re having on our economy. Where there new jobs formed? How many businesses were served? So it’s really trying to get a tie into how are these education and training systems influencing your labor market and economic indicators.

Mark Sylvester: Because I’m thinking that as this is a new program. That everybody’s kind of paying attention to it, right? Let’s see if this really does work. It sounds good. Like you know, Michael, you talk a good game, and sounds good in North Carolina, sounds good in Switzerland, let’s see how it plays out here. So figuring all of this out, kind of everybody’s looking at you. So you’ve got really good at writing reports, I get that. You had mentioned something about figuring out, what were all the work processes, all the competencies. I’m thinking as a guy who ran a software company. If someone came in, and we had to sit down and figure all of that out.

You’ve had to go Dan, and do that with each of these businesses, to figure all that out right?

Dan Weeks: Yeah. What’s nice is when Michael mentioned the O*NET codes. They already spell it out to some degree. Like within IT, there might be nine variants of IT jobs. So you find the one that’s the closest. And you mix some of the work processes that are already there. So the O*NET codes do give you a line in the sand that has some of that covered. So that made it easier. I think the key thing that Michael did, is he hired a consultant, who knows the whole apprenticeship process.

Mark Sylvester: Ah.

Michael Specchierla: I had a ringer.

Mark Sylvester: Well good. Great.

Michael Specchierla: I hired a former division of apprenticeship of standards employee.

Dan Weeks: That was key.

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Dan Weeks: Because we didn’t have to be an expert on things that are tied to the nuances of that organization. You know, we could focus on, well this is what the work needs to be, and then she would say, that won’t work, that’s not detailed enough, that’s okay. That was key.

Mark Sylvester: What got you, that’s clever. What made you decide to do that?

Michael Specchierla: Well I think you already understand that relationship is a very key component in how we launch this thing. So we had had, I had had a previous relationship with this DAS consultant, that she was in our region. She was our region’s DAS consultant. And we had met through a number of job developer meetings, that the job developers would on a monthly basis get together and compare notes, on who was hiring, who was not. And she had mentioned at one of the meetings, there are going to be these apprenticeship grants coming out, I’d like to work with you guys to make one of those happen. So I remembered that. And since the time that the community college chancellor’s office has initiated these grants, in partnership with the DAS. The division of apprenticeship of standards consultants have really come on strong. They’re really well prepared individuals, and they’ve hired more staff, to be out there, to offer this consultancy for free.

So look in your region and find how who your division of apprenticeship standards consultant is, even if you’re just a business person and wanted to start your own apprenticeship standards. Call up the DAS, they’ll send a consultant out, and they’ll walk you through the whole process. That’s what they’re meant to do.

Dan Weeks: It’s nice, because they’ll try to have an abundance mentality, say I’m not sure you’re going to be able to do this, let me follow up, because you might have to change some wording. But they weren’t just, here’s the rules, no, no, no, no, no. It was great. We worked with two DAS consultants, and someone who was formerly DAS, and they’re all trying to make it work.

Mark Sylvester: Again, partnership is everything here. Let’s talk about managing the partners. Because one of the things we didn’t talk about in an earlier episode was the regional liaisons, deputy sector navigators, what we’re doing with community college. I’m just thinking all the little slices of partnership that you need to manage. How do you keep track of it all?

Michael Specchierla: Well project management will make or break you, obviously.

Mark Sylvester: Okay.

Michael Specchierla: And so, always setting up your leads and doing follow up. And having things on your calendar is an automatic, that you’ve got to really project manage this, and have your calendar and your schedule. And follow up, follow up, follow up. You’re going to have all these partnerships, just like keeping a friendship. You’ve got to keep in touch, and keep in touch regularly. And that’s where having other partners, like each community college has what’s called a deputy sector navigator. And they’ve been tasked through the community college chancellor’s office, when helping to engage businesses, in different regional sectors.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Michael Specchierla: So in our case, Cuesta College has a business entrepreneurship deputy sector navigator. And that really is excellent for us. Because what type of business doesn’t need business entrepreneurship?

Mark Sylvester: Exactly.

Michael Specchierla: So whether it’s tech, whether it’s ag, whether it’s hospitality. Business entrepreneurship cuts across it. So she’s really great about reaching out and being, and putting on events, and convening people to talk about entrepreneurship and promote business entrepreneurship with a variety of people. And she works actively with the chamber of commerce to do trainings and things like that, on customer service et cetera. So she’s a great partner to have in this, in helping to keep your partners engaged. So that you stay relevant.

Mark Sylvester: We talk about, when we’re, we’ve created a product, and we want to drive awareness for it, knowledge, as we’re talking about the funnel. Most people, when they get the customer, they just move on. Hey, thanks! Cash the check and then move on. And what is becoming even more important now is nurturing campaigns. Nurturing strategies, right? And that’s, I see you guys nodding your heads, so it’s, like what’s a nurturing strategy that someone should put in place now, psychologically for themselves, and then what are the kinds of things they need to do to nurture these relationships?

Dan Weeks: I think as you move beyond San Luis Obispo county, where Michael and I are. And you look beyond that. I think that you have to really think about, what’s my shortlist of my first tier relationships? Second tier. Third tier. What Michael had from another grant was a lot of this in place, which was great. But I think some of the key priorities, someone needs to make, is if I’m going to have three relationships, what’s are they? And if I’m going to have five, what are they? And that’s the type of decisions you have to make if you’re starting from scratch, because that’s where Micheal was three years ago, when he set some of this up. And some of the relationships are much, much more important. Like the EBC relationship is very, very important. The chamber of commerce is. There’s a lot of ones that are important, but you have to, you can’t … you can’t make them all the number one priority.

Mark Sylvester: Well no, you can’t. Especially with a, we talked about it, lean startup mentality. Right, so you’ve got a triage. So I know that one of the things that we’ve got to do with this program is we’ve got to do reports. So I’m thinking, there’s the compliance reports that you’ve got to do for grants. But what are the other kinds of reports that you were doing back to like the businesses, or back to the educators, or back to the other people in the ecosystem? Is that something that you’re doing?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah, so different partners have different newsletters they may put out, or they have their board meetings that they have, where they have you know. What department meetings or things like that. So we’ve regularly, we’re on a number of different taskforce where we’re asked to report and give progress. And what I like about those opportunities is, if you just look at it as I need to report, you’re not getting what you need out of it. It’s a chance for other people to give you feedback too, and also to get their perspective on what’s going on. And I think that’s a real important feedback loop. Because you’ve got you know, you can get tunnel vision. Where you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Mark Sylvester: Sure.

Michael Specchierla: And getting that outside perspective, on how other people perceive you, and how they perceive your success and or failures, I think is very important to strategically planning your next move, and where you might have some blind spots.

Mark Sylvester: It’s interesting they say the brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what the person says about it when you leave the room. And it’s to that point, interesting, getting that feedback from everyone involved in the ecosystem. Because there’s so many, we’ve identified over the series of shows, so many different players that this touches, right, partners that it touches.

Dan Weeks: I think one of the things we’ve done also, is multiple times a month, we’re giving updates to groups that are interested in what we’re doing, almost like a startup giving a pitch to someone else about what their business is. We do it on an ongoing basis, but that’s how these other partners hear about us, and ask us questions, and say oh, we could partner with you, or we know some people. We know some companies. Like they’re all interested in innovation, and hearing things at their regular meetings that are interesting, not the same old thing.

Mark Sylvester: So that gives me an idea, as I’m thinking that the listener is setting up one of these programs in their community. That having, and we talked about this in the first show, about having a communications strategy. But knowing that you kind of always had this deck that was ready to go. That was what is this program, who’s it serving, and you’re kind of adding new stuff to it. So at the end of the day there might be 200 slides in it. But you show like, here’s the 15 the chamber could show, and here’s, so that was generally available, and you were kind of constantly adding to that. So it feels like one of the things we’ve not really addressed, now’s a good time to do it, is scalability. Like growing this thing. And getting other people who can amplify the story for you might be helpful. So in all these reports, it sounds like you guys might be doing this a few times a week? Where you’re going out and giving a presentation to somebody?

Michael Specchierla: I think it’s just being out there, and being part of the community. That it should come naturally. And you should be part of these regularly occurring meetings anyway. If you’re not, you’re on the outside and you need to get on the inside. Now, you need to be seen and recognized as a convener, if you want to have this type of regional partnership. That you’ve got to be the one, you may not be the lead convener, but you should be one of the conveners, and helping to refer people to each other. That’s a key, just relationship builder, that brings more partners there.

Mark Sylvester: I’m feeling like-

Michael Specchierla: Servant leadership.

Mark Sylvester: Servant, explain that?

Michael Specchierla: Well, I’ve survived a number of years with the Jesuits, and the Jesuits are a Catholic religious order that believe in this idea of service leadership. That leaders serve others. And people will follow those who serve, and not just lead, and wonder if anybody’s following them.

Mark Sylvester: So that’s a mindset that’s helped you be successful in this?

Michael Specchierla: Well, it’s another matter of you know, instead of asking for something in the business, you’re trying to give something to the business. And come into it as an equal partner. There’s a win-win situation that you need to be looking for in that partnership.

Mark Sylvester: I get a sense, you’ve said that now, four or five times, that feels like that’s not the normal way this kind of operation would work. And that’s maybe one of the reasons why this has been so successful.

Michael Specchierla: Well you don’t want to have the non profit model, where you’re constantly fund raising. You know, where your relationship with businesses is, I ask you to come to my fund raiser once a year, and you get to put your logo on my event.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: You know. That’s great if it’s for a non profit, for a worthy cause, we understand that. But this is, it’s a little different you know. We’re talking about jobs, we’re talking about economic development, workforce development. On the surface there should be some type, there’s a grant or there’s tax payer dollars that are supposed to be going towards that. But those may not be as effective as they could be. So this is where we’re trying to take a grant that is publicly funded, add some entrepreneurism and innovation to it, so that we can really make something that’s one time money, sustainable.

Dan Weeks: I can give an analogy to this. When I was with HP, I was there for 25 years. We worked closely with both Google and Yahoo, on ways to do, at the time it was printed maps, because I was with the Inkjet printing group. And I remember when we talked with Google, their advice was, let’s make it relevant, and then we’ll figure out how to monetize it. What Yahoo did was have the monetization person there at the very first meeting. And it really held back innovation. What we’re doing for apprenticeship here, from the employer’s perspective, is we’re not asking from them anything other than to have exposure to amazing people. Over time we can shift out business model, to maybe during the on the job training, we get some percentage of the wages during the on the job training, which is what unions do right now.

But in the short term, we’re just about adding value, and then we’ll figure out from the scalability, how do we add enough value that the businesses are happy to share some amount of funding back to us, as opposed to up front saying, give us X thousands of dollars and you can talk to our apprentices. What you really want to do is become relevant, and then they’ll say, I want more of those. Well here’s a good way that we can fund what we’re providing to you, post grant. And that’s you know, Michael and I are working on lots of ways that post grant, our value will be high enough, that we can be self funded.

Mark Sylvester: So we’ve talked about that. How do we not get addicted to the grant money, right. And it becomes then a sustainable business. And it feels like it’s value based selling then. Value based fees right.

Dan Weeks: Yeah, when you have credibility, and they realize wow, instead of having my jobs open for four months, and then settling, I can get people on an ongoing basis, who are superior, and I pay them an amount that’s totally fair, and I don’t have hiring for these type of people as a big strategic issue for me anymore.

Mark Sylvester: I think it’s this, your understanding of the business Dan, and your understanding of how that whole ecosystem works Michael, that it’s that dovetailing of it that is really what’s providing such an immense amount of value. Because we talked about, it wasn’t just, we’re not filling jobs, we’re building careers, which by definition is so much larger. And thinking, I mean even you know how we talk about lifetime customer value, right? There’s kind of that vibe here. What’s the lifetime customer value for that long term relationship you’re building with a business. Right. We’re going to be here ten years from now, talking about this, what’s that look like? And then also what’s the lifetime value to that employee, because heck, that boot camp was pretty good, and I’m at 85, well gee is there something around to get me up to one and a quarter?

Mark Sylvester: I mean, you start thinking about lifetime customer value, now it’s all about the value and not a transaction.

Dan Weeks: I think that’s really true. Michael and I think of this as a startup tied to education technology, and we have seed funding. And we’re really trying to avoid the venture capital route.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah.

Dan Weeks: And the way we do that, is our seed funding built enough credibility that the numbers work after the seed funding, as opposed to us having to feel like, we’re going to need additional money. And I know that if we weren’t associated with the county office of education, I couldn’t pull off this as an entrepreneur. Because it wouldn’t have the credibility of the county office of education.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: You know, this is the right way to do this. If you try to do it as a separate fintech startup, you won’t have things lined up to be able to pull it off longer term.

Mark Sylvester: And I think that it’s easy until you start digging into it and it gets a little complicated. Which is why it will take us eight shows to kind of figure it all out. But within that, that’s not that much time to explain all the nuances of it. And why the partnership model is the way to work, and why this approach has worked out so well.

Michael Specchierla: I think you need to be looking at partners who you wouldn’t normally be working with. You know. Because if you’re only talking to the people that you’re already comfortable talking with, you’re not going to get anything innovative out of that. And you may be missing a part of the conversation that you need to be involved in. You know, this conversation, Dan and I partnering up. He comes from Cal Poly HotHouse. The entrepreneur in residence. I’m from K12 education. That’s not a likely partnership, but as Dan just explained, it’s a great relationship. In that I was able to get the business intel, because of his credibility as a business entrepreneurship. But then vice versa, in building an education training program, the relationship with the county office of education, gave him credibility too. That’s what we mean by a win-win situation.

Dan Weeks: We’re both social entrepreneurs. But being tied to a county office of education really unleashed that whole social entrepreneurship effort, at another level.

Mark Sylvester: Someone once asked me what gives you permission to be in business. And that’s kind of what gives you guys permission to do this, right? And it feels like it’s the right time for this as well. Like what do you do? I mean it’s an interesting problem. We have pretty much no unemployment. Now what do we do? Right. We want to upscale, I love that word, upscaling. How do we, okay, let’s take what we have that’s already working well, and how do we make that thing work better, which generates more income. And as soon as money’s involved, people start to pay attention. And as soon as you start having success stories around that, people pay even more attention. So I’m going to guess with this podcast we’re going to have more microscopes looking at us, right, but that’s a good thing right. Because that helps us get this whole thing better.

Dan Weeks: Well, we don’t think we have all the answers. I think what we’ve done is through our launch and learn, there’s a lot of good progress we’ve made. But I think each location has unique challenges.

Mark Sylvester: Sure.

Dan Weeks: But I think some of the mindset that we’ve talked about over this podcast series just gets you to say wow, that’s a different way of looking at it. We should contrast this with the way that we were planning to do it.

Mark Sylvester: Well that’s, again, that’s what makes it interesting. You said all the stuff we’re doing is new. Hasn’t been done, right.

Dan Weeks: Michael likes to say, that if we get it right 90% of the time we still get an A. He says that all the time, which is great.

Michael Specchierla: What really keeps government institutions, and bureaucracies from being innovative is that fear of failure. That they’re afraid of not being able to check the boxes on the compliance part of the grant, the compliance reporting. But you’ve got to be able to, if you’re going to be innovative, you will have some failures. But it’s what have you learned from those failures, and how are you going to recover from them? That’s again where your relationship building and your trust that you can have with your partners, that should give you a lot more cover than you think you have. If you’re really going about, developing those partnerships, with trust and with a win-win, where everybody gets something out of it.

Mark Sylvester: You think it’s ironic Dan that he says that there’s the fear of failure in that world. Yet in the entrepreneurial world, we almost look for failure. Because it means if we’re not failing we’re not trying.

Dan Weeks: Right.

Mark Sylvester: Right. Not that we want to fail. None of us want to fail. But we try, oh, that didn’t work, oh go back, try. Ooh, that one clicked. Let’s keep doing more of that. Oh you keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. So we’re not, they don’t have that, it’s just an interesting fear, I was noticing how-

Michael Specchierla: Well, where government, or you’re a public trust.

Mark Sylvester: Yes.

Michael Specchierla: And so a failure is seen as a breach of that public trust, and you know, public funds. So in this case, we’re using, we’re being innovative with a grant that we applied for, and were rewarded in a competitive manner. So we’ve been given more of a license to take a risk.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah.

Michael Specchierla: That we’ve been asked to be innovative and be creative.

Dan Weeks: Well I think a key is, Michael’s unflappable. But it’s true, like for example.

Michael Specchierla: When you’ve had to go in front of a classroom of teenagers for 20 years, you can deal with a lot.

Dan Weeks: I love working with him, because like for example, our apprenticeship standards assume the employer was going to be pre-assigned a person before they’ve even talked to them.

Mark Sylvester: Ah.

Dan Weeks: And we said, there’s no way-

Mark Sylvester: You didn’t do that, yeah.

Dan Weeks: But that’s Michael said, well that won’t work here, we can’t make that decision until the employer has said, I want person A, and person G, and not the other ones. But their mentality was, a union hall, where they want three people and three people show up. But it’s like no, that’s just not the way this’ll work when it’s new. But there’s a saying when we go up the stairs in the HotHouse, our new business incubator, my favorite one is, “expect problems and eat them for breakfast”.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: But that’s what this is. We’re going to have some, it’s the 10% of the time. But with the 90% we get right, it feels really good.

Mark Sylvester: Guys, I appreciate how in seven episodes here, we’ve been able to go through and document you know, all of the you know the really salient pieces. What I’d like to do, for our last episode, is I want to talk about the future. I want to talk about where we think this might go. So listener, catch us on our next episode.

Mark Sylvester: Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community, and say hello to new careers, and goodbye to low wage jobs? For more episodes, visit HelloCareers.org, or send us a note to podcast@hellocareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region. Till next time, I’m Mark Silvester, with Hello Careers.

Mark Sylvester: The Hello Careers podcast explores the system developed to align business needs with education and training. It’s proven to be invaluable for dozens of businesses and people looking to create a new life for themselves. We are firm believers that you must screen for attitude and train for aptitude. We’re unpacking our insight to help you build partnerships and earn public support for an age-old way of learning a skill apprenticeship. We’ll address issues such as: Where there’s a skills gap, is there an education and training gap? How do you respond to a tight labor market? What happens when the major employer pulls out of your community? If you’re looking to create an apprenticeship program, or curious about what to do next, this show could be just the thing you’ve been looking for. I’m your house, Mark Sylvester. Now, let’s get started and talk with the team.

Mark Sylvester: Well, welcome back to the show. Michael and Dan, the past seven conversations, we’ve done the deep-dive into the program and understood Hello Careers and understand what you’ve done and we’ve taken this nice snapshot, now at the end of three years of work. So I want to spend our last episode here talking about the future. But I want to start with a question that I should have asked at the beginning, which is: what are you building?

Michael Specchierla: Really, we’re building a system that … A favorite saying that I have from a colleague over in Tularie King’s County is “Act like a program, think like a system.” Everyone can understand what a program does and who a program is, nobody wants to hear about a system. But you have to have a system in place so it’s sustainable, ’cause you don’t want something that’s personality driven and will disappear once that personality goes away. So we’ve been consciously trying to develop that system and partnership with all these different entities so that it is sustainable and is responsive to this rapidly changing economy that we live in.

Mark Sylvester: Dan, where are you?

Dan Weeks: I agree with Michael. I think it can’t be tied to apprenticeship-only scales if there is an entrepreneur residence and a 20-year teacher who’s an administrator now pulling it off. We have to think of it, it’s an eco-system, it’s a franchisable eco-system. And that’s really what we’re trying to create.

Mark Sylvester: When you look back at … Let’s just look at this last year, the things that you’ve done, what are the immediate things we’ve got to do better, let’s say, in the next year?

Dan Weeks: I think the first one is being able to handle such a large number of people applying.

Mark Sylvester: Okay.

Dan Weeks: What happened last time is we had so many people apply that we couldn’t give the last applicants the same amount of attention as the first ones. So now we’re using a new software technology that lets us give the last applicant a second before the deadline the same amount of exposure as the first. And that software system enables us to figure out, based on how much time we have available, in priority order, who should we phone screen. Which was big but it was because we knew as we scale, we can’t require manual processes that can’t handle. We had a hundred applicants yesterday.

Mark Sylvester: Hmm.

Dan Weeks: ‘Cause what happens when you go viral-

Mark Sylvester: Wow, wow.

Dan Weeks: That can happen.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Weeks: But we don’t want to say the late applicants we can’t consider because we’re still busy with the early applicants.

Mark Sylvester: We haven’t figured out how to grow this.

Dan Weeks: That was a big shift for us is just to invest in the technology.

Mark Sylvester: And the reason I ask that is that the person who’s listening to this, we want to learn from … Like it all sounds great. As I said earlier, where’s the dragon in this story? Like where are the things, the immediate things, that we’ve got to start paying attention to?

Dan Weeks: Well we talked about another one is Michael’s big, from his education background, of this hybrid approach to education and not classroom.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: What we did the first time was too much classroom and it wasn’t adaptive, as much as we would like, for the overachievers to move twice as fast, but still be inclusive to the people this is really new and are in a steep learning curve.

Mark Sylvester: How does that square with the requirements that you mention that there were a certain number of classroom hours that you had to apply for? So if you’re doing a hybrid model-

Michael Specchierla: It can be online. It can at a variety of different ways.

Mark Sylvester: Got it.

Michael Specchierla: It’s actually called related and supplemental instruction, RSI. Great term.

Mark Sylvester: Of course it is. Of course it is.

Michael Specchierla: Great term that I had to learn this year as well, RSI. And they’re very open to: “How do you deliver the information and content that’s necessary?”

Mark Sylvester: ‘Cause I know you guys are pushing the envelope in a lot of different areas, so that was one I was thinking you might …

Michael Specchierla: Yeah.

Dan Weeks: I think Michael and I both know online by itself, especially for tech related things, can be very lonely. Because, you know, the idea, like in computer science, of pair programming is so much better to learn by yourself.

Mark Sylvester: Right. Right. Yeah.

Dan Weeks: But we’re going to be pushing the envelope in the second cohort of how we actually do the instruction. We’re going to be going into three new areas we weren’t in last year. But it’s constantly learning. With that launch and learn, there’s best practices, but everything’s new every day. It’s like, “Well, this is different than last year, so something that might have worked last year doesn’t.” But that’s the fun.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah.

Dan Weeks: This is why you learn.

Michael Specchierla: On the one hand, the classroom cohort model was really good in building camaraderie between the apprentices. They automatically created their own discord group and were helping each other and there’s still a lot of camaraderie and support amongst them in the first cohort. So we want to have enough of that. Can we replicate that through meet ups and other types of networking type events with businesses? But then, there’s a lot of online content there that we don’t need to be doing that in the classroom that you should be able to do that on your own time or pick up that content. But then how do you apply it?

Mark Sylvester: What are the … There’s the “we know what we don’t know and then we don’t know what we don’t know”, that. So what are the things that you know that are coming up that are going to cause some friction for the program? That you’re thinking about now. I won’t say they keep you up at night, but they’re … Because I’m thinking these are going to come a long line for the person who’s listening. So what are the ones you know you’ve got to deal with here in the next year, year-and-a-half?

Michael Specchierla: Making sure that your work processes stay current with what the business demands are. So it’s that constant responsiveness to the changes in our rapidly changing industry.

Dan Weeks: And I think, at the same time, don’t give too much autonomy for the business to stray from the intent of what the position could be. ‘Cause businesses can propose changes to their work processes. So we have, at a high level, the default work process for a software tester, for example, and then the individual employers can say, “I’m going to change this. I’m going to change this. This ours is different.” So we have to make sure that yeah, we’ll do customization, but it still needs to be true to what a software tester, who might end up with another company a year later, has as their training.

Mark Sylvester: A certified software tester, right?

Dan Weeks: Yes. At a state level.

Mark Sylvester: Right. So you want to make sure they’re getting all of that.

Dan Weeks: Right. So it’s that balance: you want to be flexible, but not too flexible. Which means you really have to understand, “Oh, I know why you’re changing that, but I think you still need to have at least 20 hours in this other area.”

Mark Sylvester: Are there potential friction points coming up on the public sector side?

Michael Specchierla: Maintaining partnerships takes time, effort, and as I said before, expect conflict. There may be different missions, different goals, different visions from different partners. You’ve got to be respectful of each partner’s willingness to enter into the partnership or exit from the partnership if it’s not the right fit for them.

Mark Sylvester: Have you had … So, again, to give someone a practical example, have you had a conflict like that that you resolved? And how did you resolve it?

Michael Specchierla: So on certain programs, Quest a College, it wasn’t a good fit. That their computer science program has a really successful transfer rate to Cal Poly and so their instructor is just fine with their curriculum and that’s a good curriculum with good outcomes that are happening. But then, we’re working in the building and construction trades right now. We have a faculty member there that’s really interested in working with us and wants to help work together on that building and construction apprenticeship program so that they can build their own programs. So it has to be the right fit for those faculty champions and things like that. I think you have to be respectful of those teachers who are already experts in their field and have their own training programs, that they be given that autonomy and that freedom of “Do they want to participate or not? Is this the right fit for them or not?”

Dan Weeks: I’d say the number one source of challenges in us partnering with community colleges is we’re about velocity on an asynchronous schedule. So we’re about bootcamp format, not Monday, Wednesday and Friday there’s an hour class.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: And if we provide a career path on a quarterly basis, it could be dynamic of how many people we have this time versus that time. Which is very different from a master schedule at a college that says, “No, we’re on a semester system and our classes are like this and none of our rooms are available for seven weeks in a row, 8 to 5.” And that was some of our challenge is just … Bootcamps maximize learning per calendar day, not per quarter or per semester or per AS degree.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah.

Dan Weeks: So I think that’s a fundamental challenge that’s addressable, but it’s just … It’s a different paradigm.

Michael Specchierla: Personalized learning is something that you can see on the Internet. Everyone is trying to figure out what that can look like.

Mark Sylvester: Right, right, right.

Michael Specchierla: And it’s going to be very disruptive to traditional institutional programs where there’s a class schedule and there is a curriculum and there is a sequence of events that happen. So the idea of personalized learning is going to be disruptive and so it will polarize existing parties who are doing these types of things. So-

Mark Sylvester: Isn’t that going to massively disrupt education though in general?

Michael Specchierla: Yes.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: That’s the elephant in the room.

Dan Weeks: But I think that’s what we’re on the forefront of doing is this is education done as a tech startup. But I think this type of mentality, of the popup university tied to employer demand, that’s very disruptive.

Michael Specchierla: And there’s a certain question of generalized education has definitely its place, but then there’s these specific, specialized training.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Michael Specchierla: And, you know, I think they both need … There’s a place for both of them. Right now, what we’re intensively exploring is what does this specialized training look like? Based on what are some specific needs that are needed in the economy and the local labor market.

Mark Sylvester: And because you s … At the very beginning, I loved what you said: “Act like a program, think like a system.” You’ve engineered a system that’s very agile, right, that’s very flexible. So that Dan, if you go in and have a conversation with a big tech employer here in town, who now their management gave them a new onus, they’re now also in charge of cloud, or whatever it, or something. Now they have a new need, you’ve got to come back and be able to accommodate that. So having a flexible system is important to be responsive.

Dan Weeks: A great example of that is one of the manufacturing companies were on a tight schedule and they asked when were we going to have our next round of apprenticeship. And I told them and he goes, “Well, what if I fund it?”

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Dan Weeks: And it’s like exactly.

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Dan Weeks: Because that means the value’s clear for the employer, that we’re strategic for their ability to grow, as opposed to a “Well, when will you get more funding so that you can do an apprenticeship for me?”

Michael Specchierla: And that speaks to the value of the apprenticeship system.

Mark Sylvester: Absolutely.

Michael Specchierla: Is that it’s a process, that includes a bureaucracy, but is flexible and adaptive to what the employer’s needs are. It really puts the employer in the driver’s seat of what do you want to have happen and how can we work together to make this happen?

Dan Weeks: It’s the-

Michael Specchierla: It takes multiple partners to make it happen.

Dan Weeks: It’s the ultimate compliment when an employer says, “If you can’t do it on your schedule, what if we hire and you do it on mine?”

Mark Sylvester: And so the question is: are you … I mean you’re still getting rid of your second cohort, you’re still getting it together. So I’m going to guess the answer was not yet, but “Hmm, that’s interesting. Let’s see if we can figure it out.”

Dan Weeks: Well what we did is we already had funding for building and construction and then we looked for similarities between building and construction and advanced manufacturing. And with that same class that Michael mentioned, that’s needed for building and construction, that’s the feeder class for advanced manufacturing. So we were able to get two different sectors to have this same core class. And now we’re able to go in two areas instead of one with the same basic infrastructure. ‘Cause there was so much in common between the core skills for an entry-level building and construction person and advanced manufacturing. But we had to take a step back to say, “Wow, there’s more similar than they are different. How do we focus on just, in a Venn diagram, where it overlaps?” And that’s what the class does.

Michael Specchierla: And I’m really loving the fact that we have Quest a College faculty that are hearing that same discussion and recognizing these hybrid skills that are valued. We have workforce development board, job developers, listen to that same conversation and thinking how we can cooperate and braid funding together to make that type of training actually happen and go out and, together, screen and find people to make that opportunity.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, ’cause it takes a village. I mean it takes a lot of different people to … Like when you want to bring on a new domain, there’s a lot you gotta do, right? I’m guessing. You’re both shaking your heads like, “Yep, there’s a lot to do.”

Dan Weeks: Yep.

Mark Sylvester: So how many … Let’s go three years out, simple, three years out. How many domains do you think you’ll cover at that point?

Michael Specchierla: In San Luis Obispo, we’ve identified six major sectors that really drive the local economy. One of those sectors is going away: the energy, power and utilities.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Michael Specchierla: It will not be as dominant of a sector.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Michael Specchierla: It may still be a driving sector, but that’s to be seen when it plays. But there’s what we call uniquely slow, because we have a lot of wine and agriculture and tourism. And then there’s advanced manufacturing. There’s knowledge and innovation, which includes things like government employees from the college, university and K12 sector. But also finance and the tech sector is sort of included in there. So that’s a big sector right there. And then there’s also health care and …

Dan Weeks: Is it hospitality?

Michael Specchierla: And hospitality … No.

Dan Weeks: Or tourism?

Michael Specchierla: No.

Dan Weeks: That’s uniquely slow.

Michael Specchierla: It’s uniquely slow. Building and construction. The one we just mentioned.

Mark Sylvester: Got it. Got it.

Michael Specchierla: So we’re really … I think the drivers right now are the tech sector, which is in the knowledge and innovation.

Mark Sylvester: Yep, yep.

Michael Specchierla: The advanced manufacturing and the building and construction. Because housing is on the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Mark Sylvester: You bet.

Michael Specchierla: How can we make things more livable and affordable?

Mark Sylvester: Right, yeah.

Michael Specchierla: In the central coast, along all of California.

Mark Sylvester: Right, right.

Michael Specchierla: So those are three main areas. Health care, we’d like to be involved in there, but I think that’s already sort of a system that’s already in place with the licensing and the regulations already within there. So that would be an additional challenge of dealing with the health care sector.

Mark Sylvester: It feels like with these three sectors, once you get them fully built out and you look at all the granularity within them, that’ll keep you busy for ten years.

Dan Weeks: Well, the goal is the thousand additional people. And I think from those sectors, we can get a thousand additional people.

Mark Sylvester: What’s that … You said it in an earlier episode. What’s the deadline to have those thousand new ones?

Dan Weeks: Seven years, when Diablo starts their decommissioning.

Mark Sylvester: So just in listening to you guys talk about how integrated this program is in this community at the public sector, the private sector, the educational sector, everybody that’s involved and the community knowing what’s going on, a thousand feels like you’re off by an order of a magnitude. Just outside guy, looking at you guys who are living with the numbers, but things are going well and as people start to talk to people, both as students who are getting the better jobs. The employers as saying, “Oh my gosh, we’re gettin’ rockstars here.” And the educators are, I mean … Once you’ve kind of … It’s going well now, but once this gets scaled and it’s mass … A thousand just feels small.

Dan Weeks: Well, we’d like to under promise and over deliver.

Mark Sylvester: Fair enough. Fair enough. I got that.

Dan Weeks: And I think if we can make the goal sooner. For a lot of people with the scarcity mentality, they’ll say, “Well, how are you going to do it without grant dollars?” So our challenge is we need to have a large percentage of that thousand isn’t tied to grant money.

Mark Sylvester: And we’ve talked about that, right. Is how sustainability is weaning yourself off grant money.

Dan Weeks: Right. So we like that challenge.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah. Well, the entrepreneur. I mean, it’s just like, “Give me a challenge. Okay, yeah, okay. What else you got? That’s it?” Right? You know. So I like that. So in 2025, I want to come back here, okay? And I reserve the right to call you guys to the table and I want to see what that number is. And that’s not the only number, as we said in another episode, I think if we look at the economic impact of this program that … Whereas, there was a huge economic thing happening to the community that this has responded to. It feels like the economic impact is going to be much greater because of the way you’ve engineered things, the way you’ve built the system, the way you’ve built the partnerships, the way you’ve thoughtfully and intentionally thought about each piece of it. I mean, I think the people that are listening, they’d honestly agree with that and look to this as a best-practice model for how to set it up.

Dan Weeks: Right. I don’t think it’s unique. What we’ve done isn’t unique to this small county of San Luis Obispo. I think it could work … I moved here from San Diego. I see no reason it couldn’t work in San Diego, it’s just the numbers would be much, much bigger ’cause it’s a larger population base.

Mark Sylvester: So it’s not unique in the sense that it’s … What you’ve done is unique, I want to give you guys that.

Dan Weeks: Correct.

Mark Sylvester: So this is … Which is why we’re talking about, which is why we want to get this show out there so that other people can do this, ’cause this is an important thing.

Mark Sylvester: What milestones have you set for yourself along the way? Do you have some internal things you’re looking to do?

Michael Specchierla: Well the immediate milestones are, as we get these starter grants, is achieving those milestones we set forward in the grants themselves.

Mark Sylvester: In the grant. Okay, got it.

Michael Specchierla: ‘Cause those help lay the foundation of setting up a prototype, setting up your initial success and setting just that core process that you know you can build upon. So in terms of before December of this, before December 2018, we want to have 50 registered apprentices. Within our first, you know, within the first … The IT and software testing that we started. Next milestones are we’ve set for this summer, going into the winter as well, is to bring that bootcamp, full-stack Bootcamp, to San Luis Obispo, which has not been on the west coast before, it’s one of the better bootcamps out there, most highly rated. And getting at least a hundred people to go through that process of being eligible for the full-stack Bootcamp.

Dan Weeks: The full-stack Bootcamp is to create full software developers in 17 weeks. And so it’s an intensive program, but really what it is it’s a head of household job in a matter of months. And that’s why we’re going after it is it’s not a job that gets you … It’s not a bootcamp that gets you halfway to a head of household job, it gets you straight to it. And so we have to have a pre-apprenticeship phase with over a hundred people to find, within those hundred, who are the 30 that are good at software and like it. ‘Cause a lot of people who are exposed to software development might be good at it, but they don’t like it. And some people like it but they’re not good at it.

Mark Sylvester: Right. It does take a certain temperament.

Dan Weeks: Right. And so over the summer, we’re partnering with the high school computer science teachers to be these meetup groups to help people.

Mark Sylvester: Oh.

Dan Weeks: And then we’re doing the classes just at night. But we really want to expose, throughout the county, even if they don’t go to the coding bootcamp, they know understand software in a way they never did before and they can apply it toward whatever they do going forward. But we’re doing it in a way that the goal is let’s have a group of people that we can show now are at a head of household job, where six months earlier they could be working at In-N-Out.

Mark Sylvester: So with the IT, the security, the QA jobs, those are more entry-level, right?

Dan Weeks: They’re … Yeah-

Michael Specchierla: Those are entry-level positions.

Mark Sylvester: And then these full-stack jobs are higher up in the food chain, right?

Michael Specchierla: Yeah.

Dan Weeks: Yes. So the typical coding bootcamp grads run 80,000 a year. And for the IT and the software testing are more like 40. All of our software testers want to become full-stack developers.

Mark Sylvester: Right, right.

Michael Specchierla: So we have the beginning of the pipeline and we have the end of the pipeline.

Mark Sylvester: Right.

Dan Weeks: Right.

Michael Specchierla: Figuring out how to meet in the middle, that’s really the challenge we have moving forward. And part of the approach of setting up the screening for who’s eligible for the full-stack bootcamp is about fleshing out how do we screen for attitude, train for aptitude through that hybrid-type learning of online challenges and content delivery combined with meet-ups and practicum and open labs where we can help do the intervention of accelerating the intervention or solving any barriers that they may be having to progressing.

Mark Sylvester: It dawned on me that one of the things that might help you guys … ‘Cause you’re doing this great job of helping people who want to do this and this is admirable. Are there other Hello Career-like programs that you’re aware of that you could build an association? Some tribe of guys that are doing … I don’t want to say guys, but people who are doing what you are doing, so that you could be continuing to learn from one another so that … Right now, you took a cue from Switzerland, North Carolina, right? And so now people are going to take a cue from you. That’s totally going to happen, right, ’cause we’re putting it out there, this is how it was done. I would love to see that there is a meeting of the minds to find out well, what are some of the regional challenges? What are some of the other industry challenges? What do we do if we don’t have as a great … And there’s a great educational system here, right, great educational infrastructure. What are some of those other things? Because I know you’re looking to take this model, I think you said earlier franchising this thing out there, figuring it out. So it would be interesting for you guys to be able to talk to these other people. So I would encourage our listener to get in touch with you guys at Hello Careers so that we can start those conversations because you’re obviously proven very adept at partnerships and building relationships. So now let’s take that up a level and say, okay, well what’s the eco-system of people that are doing what we’re doing and how can we make even a bigger impact? What can we learn?

Dan Weeks: I think that’s a great point. I think each local market has unique challenges.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Dan Weeks: And, at the same time, has very similar challenges.

Mark Sylvester: Well that’s where … I’m going back to this think like a system. Great thing about a system is if done right, it becomes universally applicable with just a few little modifications to just get it to fit right, but most of the time it’s going to work just … Well, you built consumer products that had to fit a bunch … So you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Dan Weeks: Yep, yep. I think the key thing is knowing where the tweaks should be in this system, ’cause you know the system well enough.

Mark Sylvester: Right, exactly.

What advice, as we come to the end of this series of episodes here, what advice would you give to the program administrator who’s feeling a little frustrated or maybe feeling a little overwhelmed and they listen to this and say, “Oh man, that sounds good, you guys, but, god, I’m just buried”?

Michael Specchierla: You’ve got to be a visionary. You’ve got to be willing to take that risk. The advice though is the payoff will be there, that getting more partners involved, rather than being isolated, could solve a lot of your problems. So it’s worthwhile to recognize that you’re not alone in this, that you have some partners. And to just spend some time and strategically think about who would be strategic partners that can share this load with you.

Mark Sylvester: That’s … And what I appreciate is you’re so on-brand with that. ‘Cause we’ve said that answer. That’s been consistent throughout all of these shows. Every single thing that you had to do was like, “How can I do this with partners? How can we do this with partners? How do we do that?”

Dan Weeks: But the partners live vicariously through us. What I see … Like I gave an update to America’s job force earlier this week. Everyone there, all their partners, go, “How can I help? How can I help?” Because they see the enthusiasm, they see the innovation and all of a sudden there’s like nine groups I didn’t even know what they did all giving me their business card.

Mark Sylvester: Wow, wow.

Dan Weeks: Said, “Oh, I’ve got people. Oh, I’ve got employers.” But we’re just getting … Communicating what we’re trying to do and it reminds me angel investors in startups. They often just live vicariously through their startup because they’re older, they can’t do it themselves, but a lot of these groups were saying, “Gosh, I wish I was part of this team. I can help you. Please let me help you.” Because they want to help because they’re excited about what we’re trying to do and why and they like the anchoring. It’s tied to something specific toward our biggest employer leaving town where I don’t know if there’s a single other concrete step that anyone’s taking given that’s occurring. Everyone’s still talking about the problem, we’re doing something and I believe we’ll be well over a thousand also. But we’re sticking our neck out and we’re proud of doing it.

Mark Sylvester: Someone said to me just yesterday, “Let’s stop admiring the problem.”

Michael Specchierla: Well and that’s what that overwhelmed person may be doing right there.

Mark Sylvester: Yep, yep.

Michael Specchierla: Is that they’re overwhelmed because they’ve isolated themselves, not con … Unwittingly isolated themselves and have taken the entire burden on themselves. Of course you’re going to be overwhelmed. You’re alone fighting the dragon.

Mark Sylvester: Yep.

Dan Weeks: And I’d say that overwhelmed person, even if they’re right 80% of the time, they’re still going to get a B and if they do nothing, they haven’t changed anything at all. The key is, with entrepreneurship, you have to enjoy the ride.

Mark Sylvester: Yeah, you do.

Dan Weeks: ‘Cause the key thing is is well look how much better it is, even if we’re not perfect, than if we wouldn’t have been on this ride.

Michael Specchierla: What everybody’s afraid of with a group project is that one person’s going to be stuck doing all the work. So all these partners, if it’s looked at as, “Oh, this is a group project, who’s really doing all the work?” Yeah, you’re going to be overwhelmed, you’re not going to see the value of the partnership. But you’ve gotta build that partnership. You’ve gotta be able to … Are you the leader or the follower? Are you the facilitator? How do you bring these people together and get through how are we going to work on this together? So in our case, we’re lucky in that we have this context of a major employer leaving. That it really did provide a context for everybody taking notice and wanting to take some action. But we could still all be sittin’ around, wringing our hands, wondering what to do, but somebody step up, take a lead, take a risk.

Mark Sylvester: I want to button it up with that. But what I would like to do next is I’d like to go and talk to some of the partners. So I’d love to have the politicians in and the business partners in and some of the students in and the journeymen in. So let’s wrap this at eight and then let’s come back and have some other conversations. I know our listener will appreciate listening to some of the recipients and the partners talk about this as well.

Dan Weeks: Great idea.

Mark Sylvester: And, you guys, thank you so much. This has been very, very enjoyable. And getting to learn what you’re building, how you’re building it, why you’re building it, why you guys are so excited. And I can tell why when you go out in public, other people want to … You guys are magnetic in that it’s like there’s gravitational force, right. That’s that unknown … When we say screening for attitude, you guys had to have that attitude that draws people towards you. It’s easier to make partners when you have that. So thank you so much and just all the best to you.

Dan Weeks: Thank you.

Michael Specchierla: Thank you.

Mark Sylvester: Thank you for listening. How will you bring this system to your community and say hello to new careers and goodbye to low-wage jobs? For more episodes, visit hellocareers.org, or send us a note to hellocareers.org. We’d love to hear from you with questions or success stories of how apprenticeship is working in your region. ‘Til next time, I’m Mark Sylvester with Hello Careers.