Lifetime Skills Guarantee – Lib Dems urge Govt to look at Skills Wallet proposals as part of adult education offer. Paul Champion, TranZed Apprenticeships believe a similar Learning Wallet Guarantee would support the long term “skills led recovery” that is needed across the USA!

Lib Dems urge Govt to look at Skills Wallet proposals as part of adult education offer
— Read on www.fenews.co.uk/press-releases/55788-lib-dems-urge-govt-to-look-at-skills-wallet-proposals-as-part-of-adult-education-offer

At TranZed Apprenticeships, we have been advocating for a similar initiative across the USA. This would enable employers and their local communities to have a cost effective starting point to ensure that the Skills Led recovery that we need could be a reality. This is an a short piece from our Post COVID Memo that we published a few weeks ago:

Pivoting in a COVID 19 World (TranZed Apprenticeships View)

The past months, and the year ahead are shaping the jobs market in profound ways. What does safety look like in this new reality? What skills are needed to continue teleworking during a shutdown? The questions are broad for both the employer and employee. Even after we have a vaccine, what aspects of these changes just become the new normal? TranZed is pivoting to address these new realities.

Before COVID 19, TranZed already was preparing an online catalog of training materials and an apprentice portal, and digitizing program management capacity. We also began shifting our coaching services, alumni support, and onboarding process to online platforms. These changes were not made to sweep human interaction away. Rather, it’s enhancing our capacity to continue our work in a telework world and to remove barriers such as lack of childcare or access to public transportation while still being able to meet the needs of job-seekers and employers. 

TranZed is also changing our elevation from an exclusive program service provider to that of a wide-reaching facilitator able to support scalable apprenticeship opportunities, multi-sector employer needs, and dozens of candidate recruitment organizations. We’re leveraging our expertise and infrastructure to offer program management, registration, and apprenticeship expertise to all parties: individual, organization, and corporation. This higher positioning will help add stability and structure to the Apprenticeship movement during all of the changes we are currently experiencing. 

The expansion of non-standard workforce programs created new challenges for training policies

and worker re- and up-skilling, especially for minority populations and un- and under-skilled workers. This led TranZed to revamp the individual learning account concept, to create our own Learning Wallet.

Learning accounts increase individual choice and responsibility. More freedom

for individuals strengthens “ownership” of their training and brings results in alignment with their personal goals and career aspirations. However, these account programs often experience limited success due to being under-resourced, wildly complex, and qualitatively inconsistent. They also lacked cultural competency in their implementation to reach the very populations they sought to serve. The TranZed Learning Wallet is defined by a few critical characteristics: Ease of Use, Cultural Competency, Resourced Accounts, Consistent, High-level Training and Certification, Continued Support, and Aligned Business Needs.

Any apprenticeship program faces a series of complex compliance regulations. Our Apprenticeship Connections platform helps address the array of compliance needs through a platform that tracks and monitors all of these factors in real time. It takes care of the burden of tracking so employers and apprentices can dedicate more of their energies to the work at hand. The platform will be the catalyst for the large expansion of apprenticeships; it allows TranZed to manage all of the administrative activities connected to a Registered Apprenticeship while allowing training organizations and employers to focus on training, placement, and support. Apprenticeship Connections will greatly reduce the amount of effort on the part of the employer which – in turn – will encourage more companies to start their own apprenticeship programs and expand programs into any industry.

Finally, we are finalizing our Open for Apprenticeship (O4A) training portal for State Agencies and labor departments (or anyone else in the workforce development space). Apprenticeship is an idea that is gaining traction, but is not completely commonplace in the American market outside of traditional “blue-collar” trades such as plumbing, HVAC, and electrical wiring. We created the O4A toolkit to help employers better understand and address their motivations, culture, and immediate needs. O4A also exposes businesses to the value of the model and helps them plot a clear roadmap to make apprenticeship a central tenet of their recruitment strategy and hiring practices. The O4A process is critical to how TranZed is supporting employers, agencies, and States to ensure that there is a consistent approach to defining apprenticeship, demonstrating how apprentices fit within an employer’s staff structure, and calculating the potential return on investment for the employer.