Perspective | The apprenticeship misconception North Carolina can’t afford

I used to think apprenticeships were for people who didn’t go to college — electricians, plumbers, maybe HVAC technicians. I associated the word with trade work, and left it at that.

But a recent experience changed that.

As a graduate student at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, I recently took part in a student consulting project where teams get paired with real organizations tackling real problems. Our client was myFutureNC, and our assignment was to figure out how North Carolina could get more employers on board with apprenticeships.

I came into the project knowing almost nothing about how apprenticeships actually worked. I had a vague idea — a wrong one — and a lot to learn.

Then I spent a semester talking to employers and community colleges across the state, and that changed everything.

During the project, our team spoke with employers across every region of the state in industries such as manufacturing, health care, technology, and more. I expected to learn about companies confidently using apprenticeships as a proven growth tool. What I actually found was something more complicated and more urgent.

An in-person visit is where it really clicked for me. I walked into an advanced manufacturing operation and sat down with an employer who lit up the moment he started talking about his apprentices. He wasn’t reciting a business case or reading off talking points. He was telling me about people, workers he had grown himself, who knew the job, knew the culture, and stayed.

He told me apprenticeships gave him the ability to build his own talent pipeline, and that his apprentices showed up differently than other hires. More dedicated. More invested. You could tell this wasn’t just a workforce strategy to him. It was something he genuinely believed in.

That conversation reframed everything for me. I walked in thinking apprenticeships were a niche program for a specific type of worker. I walked out realizing they were solving problems that every employer I’d spoken to was worried about: losing good people, struggling to find workers with the right skills, and spending money training someone only to watch them leave. 

Apprenticeships weren’t an alternative to a real workforce strategy. They were one. The numbers back that up, too. Employers with apprenticeship programs consistently report strong return on investment, higher retention and lower turnover costs, and workers who are trained specifically for the role from day one.

What surprised me even more was what was holding employers back. It wasn’t skepticism about whether apprenticeships worked. It was that starting an apprenticeship program felt complicated before they’d even tried it. Eighty-two percent of employers not participating in apprenticeships in our survey described the registration process as administratively complex, but employers who had actually gone through it said the opposite — smooth, supported, worth it. 

The program wasn’t the barrier. The perception of the program was.

That gap matters more than it might seem. Because while employers are figuring this out, the system supporting them is at risk. Because it means the program isn’t failing, it’s just not reaching enough people yet. And that’s a solvable problem, if the funding is there to solve it.

What makes this moment matter is that the funding supporting ApprenticeshipNC, the state’s apprenticeship agency, is at risk. 

Apprenticeships are a strategy that is already working. Employers who use it believe in it. Community colleges have built real infrastructure around it. Wake Tech alone has about 500 registered apprentices and is partnering with more than 150 employers heading into 2026. The foundation is there. The results are there.

North Carolina is at a point where it can build on something proven, or let it quietly erode because not enough people understood what it was or what it could do. I spent the first part of this semester as someone who didn’t know what an apprenticeship really meant. I’m not the only one. But I’m also proof that once someone takes the time to explain it clearly, it changes how you see the whole picture. 

That explanation needs to reach a lot more people — employers across every sector, students figuring out their next step, and policymakers deciding where to put their support. The employers who’ve done apprenticeships will tell you it’s worth it. That is why myFutureNC supports funding for ApprenticeshipNC in the Workforce Act of 2026 — because the employers who’ve done it already know it works.