Delivering Skills: Apprenticeship Program Sponsorship and Transition from Training

Formal apprenticeship programs in the US construction industry are organized under one of three forms: jointly by unions and management in the unionized sector, and unilaterally by a group of employers or by a single employer in the open shop sector. I use parametric survival analysis to compare completion and quit rates of electrical and mechanical trades apprentices across program types, controlling for sex, race, education, wage, program size, and unemployment rate among other factors. I find substantial and statistically significant differences in terms of the probability of completion and cancellation and the duration of apprenticeship. Apprentices in joint programs, regardless of demographic characteristics, have the highest probability of completion, followed by unilateral multiple and unilateral single employers, but their average time to graduation is longer. The mean duration of a cancelled apprenticeship in open shop programs does not appear to be long enough for apprentices to accumulate a substantial amount of skills. Although non-joint programs graduate a smaller fraction of their apprentices, those who graduate do so at a significantly faster pace than their counterparts in joint programs.