Numlock Sunday: Annelies Goger on apprentices

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Dr. Annelies Goger who wrote “Apprenticeships are an overlooked solution for creating more access to quality jobs” at Brookings. Here's what I wrote about it:

Apprenticeships can be really effective ways to get people into skilled jobs without burdening them with up-front costs and often prohibitively expensive educational trials. Over the past decade, several bits of legislation have gone a ways to expanding the number of apprenticeships available to new workers. From 2009 to 2019, the number of active Registered Apprentices was up 51 percent to 633,476. One push aims to expand the number of trades that someone can break into by way of apprenticeships from the current 27 to 74, opening up 3.2 million jobs that could be filled beyond the traditional f…