IDEO CEO: Want More Jobs? Bring Back Apprenticeships
Last night President Obama presented his plan to create jobs to Congress. His proposals contained the expected mix of tax credits and infrastructure spending, but are there other ideas to get more Americans into work that are less frequently discussed? Tim Brown, CEO of design firm IDEO, thinks he has one, but his approach won't be totally unfamiliar to regular Entry-Level Rebel readers.
Speaking on NPR's Morning Edition, Brown recommended a new take on an old-fashioned way to get young people working -- apprenticeships. He told host Steve Inskeep:
Stone masons, and then more recently in sort of industrial jobs, and engineering apprenticeship was used. And I think it's just as appropriate when we think of modern, technically focused jobs... you could hire younger. Maybe you're hiring before college, or maybe just after undergraduate college, rather than having to wait for somebody who's gone and got a masters or something. And it allows you to pick them earlier, work with them longer and really build those skills trough tacit learning.Brown went on to explain that IDEO was interested in implementing an apprenticeship program and that the idea has obvious appeal in Silicon Valley where there are "thousands of open software engineering jobs in startups" that companies cannot find skilled candidates to fill. "If apprenticeship could start creating a stream of skilled software engineers in the future, I think it would be well worth business taking that investment," Brown concluded.I mean, there's different kinds of ways that we learn, and tacit learning is about learning through doing, versus when we go to college, it's more like explicit learning when we learn through knowledge, through theory. And apprenticeship is great for this tacit learning.
So what's holding companies back? Brown conceded that there are no legal barriers to taking on apprentices, but noted America, unlike countries like Germany, does not have a strong culture of apprenticeship. "I think tax credits perhaps would help just get something like this underway," Brown said.
Brown isn't the only high profile business leader to start a conversation about apprenticeships -- and we're not talking about on reality television here. As we've reported before, VC Mark Suster has also floated the idea, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel's much-discussed "20 Under 20" program, which pays promising young people to drop out of university and get their hands dirty starting businesses is, in essence, a very particular sort of apprenticeship scheme.
With so many young people desperate for jobs, college coming in for criticism as a path to employment, and such high-profile business support for apprenticeships why isn't the idea higher up on the political agenda?
Read More on BNET:
- Designing Future Leaders the IDEO Way
- Should Apprenticeships Make a Come Back?
- Obama Jobs Plan: Some Worthy Ideas, but It Won't Turn the Tide