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She wanted to earn credentials that would allow her to advance in the field, but it was slow going. Briones, 55, was working 40 hours a week at the San Francisco Bay area child care center and tending to her own family. It was tough to find the time and money to attend classes on a salary of about $15 an hour.

But in 2022, she saw a flyer promoting an Early Childhood Apprenticeship Program at nearby Skyline College and figured it was worth a try. Three years later, she has earned child care credentials that allowed her to be promoted above colleagues who have been working at the center twice as long as her. And that promotion more than doubled her pay.

The wraparound support from counselors, teachers, peers and mentors, along with the free tuition and on-the-ground learning helped her get — and stay — on the right path, she said.

“Now I know what I need to get done because they are guiding me,” she said. “I am motivated to keep moving forward.”

Briones is part of a growing movement of apprenticeships in nontraditional fields. While the apprenticeship model has long been successful in industries such as construction and health care, over the past decade or so policymakers, educators and industry have focused on how such apprenticeships can be reimagined for careers such as child care.

In 2001, only a handful of states offered Registered Apprenticeship Programs for entry level early childhood education positions, meaning an apprenticeship that’s approved by — and therefore eligible for funding by — the U.S. Department of Labor or a state agency. As of 2023, 35 states now have such regional or statewide programs according to a report published by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

To get approved, a program must meet specific criteria: It must be a paid position as part of a business/employer partnership; have structured on-the-job training; provide instruction related to their field (in early childhood that is typically in a classroom setting); earn guaranteed pay increases and an industry credential.

“We want to professionalize the field. We want to ensure that we have high quality educators and that they’re supported,” said Binal Patel, executive director of the Boston-based nonprofit Neighborhood Villages, which operates a Registered Apprenticeship Program for early childhood educators in the Boston area. “However, to require degrees without providing the support that goes with it to employees who are making poverty-level wages and often working two [or] three jobs to do so is pushing people out of the field.”

And the country desperately needs child care workers; the number of child care teachers, family care providers and program administrators has dropped from more than 2 million to 1.6 million over the past decade, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center report. But workforce challenges, especially those related to compensation, make it tough to draw people to the field. Child care workers earn less annually than 98% of other occupations and face poverty rates 7.7% higher than public school teachers, the report stated.

Apprenticeships won’t fix the myriad problems facing the country’s child care system. Besides the dramatically low wages for employees, employers struggle with wafer-thin margins and parents with paying the costs of child care.

But they are a move in the right direction. The Registered Apprenticeship Programs can be operated or sponsored by a variety of organizations, including workforce development agencies, employers, nonprofits, community colleges or unions.

In better resourced industries, such as manufacturing or technology, employers or unions often cover the costs of apprenticeships. In early childhood education, where there is less funding available, those sponsoring the apprenticeships — such as Neighborhood Villages — often rely on a variety of external sources, such as state, federal and private grants to cover the costs of classes and extras that may be needed such as textbooks or laptops.

The nonprofit Early Care and Education Pathways to Success (ECEPTS) develops and administers 35 early care and education registered apprenticeships in California — including Skyline — that have employed about 1,400 apprentices since 2019. The organization also offers technical assistance to programs and develops apprenticeships in 20 other states.

While the national completion rate for apprenticeships in all industries is about 40%, about 75 to 80% of ECEPTS apprentices finish their programs, said Randi Wolfe, ECEPTS’s founder and executive director.

“It’s expensive and it’s not quick,” Wolfe said. “But quick doesn’t really give you what you want.”

In a study about a California apprenticeship for early educators — conducted by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley — almost all of the 101 respondents said their apprenticeship increased their knowledge of child development theory, leading to changing the quality of care and instruction. The majority also said they planned to seek a role with more responsibility as a result of participating in the program.

While government funding covers the costs of most apprenticeships, the child care program the apprentice works for needs to pay for the required wage increase, which varies. That can be a sticking point.

Temple Beth Shalom Children’s Center in Needham, Massachusetts, is part of Neighborhood Villages apprenticeship program; the center has had eight apprentices in the past two years, all of them entry level workers who wanted to pursue licensing to allow them advance their careers.

Temple Beth Shalom agreed to a $2 per hour increase when an apprentice finishes the 2,000-hour program.That comes to an additional $4,000 per apprentice.

“It was a big commitment, and we also felt like we really wanted to be a part of it,” said . Ellen Dietrick, Temple Beth Shalom’s senior director of learning and engagement. “So, we figured out how to make it work. But that was definitely a challenge.”

At Skyline, the California community college, these costs for apprenticeships are covered by  government grants. Its Early Childhood Apprenticeship Program grew out of a problem: College officials saw that it was taking on average seven years for students to get an associate’s degree in early childhood education.

Many students “were only able to take one class a semester because of personal commitments, as well as working full time,” said Michael Kane, Skyline’s dean of business, education and professional programs. “We were looking for a way to support them and allow them to at least cut that in half. The apprenticeship gave us the ability to get them full-time employment within the field, and then we could actually push them to do at least two courses per semester.”

Kane and his colleague Tina Watts, Skyline’s education and child development department coordinator and faculty member, studied the best way to run such a program for two years before applying for a state grant. An important goal, Kane said, was to make the program sustainable after grant money ran out.

The Skyline program places apprentices with six employers who regularly communicate with college faculty about the progress of the apprentices. The apprenticeship requires students to take six units a semester, as well as complete their work and attend community practice meetings three times a semester.

In exchange, apprentices receive free tuition and potentially other financial support, as needed, for books and transportation.

Since 2021, about 40 students entered the program, the majority of them Latina women, and about half are still in it, Watts said; the others dropped out for a variety of reasons.

There was a disconnect, Kane said, between excitement for the program, which was high, and the ability to fully commit, which was lower. “Every one of our students has complicated lives,” Kane said, adding that many applicants work two or three jobs, are living in a home with multiple generations, and are responsible for caring for their own children, or finding someone who can. Skyline has had to adjust the application process to consider the ability to commit to the program, Kane said.

By addressing that issue, more students are in the program who are committed to finishing it, leading to fewer dropouts, Watts said. Even if they stop out, they receive support to return to the program more quickly.

As apprenticeships are embraced as a nonpartisan issue, fears abound that the Trump administration’s proposal to consolidate numerous workforce programs into one funding stream may affect money available for registered apprenticeship programs — and that states, faced with difficult choices about resources, may not pick up the slack.

In 2023, for example, ECEPTS received a one-year $3 million contract from the U.S. Department of Labor, with an option to renew for four more years, to expand its work nationally. Recently the department notified ECEPTS, among numerous other organizations that run registered apprenticeship programs, that it would not renew the third year of the contract, Wolfe said.

For now, ECEPTS has enough of a diversified funding base to continue its work for the next two to three years, she added, but that won’t be true for many other apprenticeship programs.

And that will mean fewer opportunities for people like Rebeca Briones, who sees her apprenticeship as the beginning, not the end. She has her goals planned out now including pursuing the credential needed to become a site supervisor and trained to teach students with special needs.

“I want to continue providing the best experiences to our children and parents [and] our community,” she said.

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