The Making of a Modern-Day Apprentice

Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune

Bussing tables at a Holiday Inn, Victor Gutierrez couldn’t help envying the well-dressed businessmen whose dishes he cleared. “I told myself that when I make it, I’ll wear a suit and tie every day to work no matter what I’m doing,” he says.

But what with that job, another one at McDonald’s, and a full-time schedule at Harold Washington College, in Chicago, the path to prosperity wasn’t at all clear.

The 18-year-old, who was sleeping four hours a night, losing weight, and rarely seeing his wife and infant daughter, confided in his counselor that he was on the verge of burnout.

A few blocks away, a giant financial-services company was confronting its own dilemma. With a graying work force, Aon faced a looming shortage of employees. Meanwhile, the graduates of four-year colleges, whom it typically hired for entry-level jobs, were getting bored and leaving.

Which got company leaders thinking: What if Aon joined forces with the community college, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, to provide training to students who might be more likely to stick around? Younger and less seasoned, they’d need more support to fit in to a corporate culture.

It wouldn’t be cheap, but the apprenticeship model Aon had used in its London headquarters, and which was common among Chicago’s pipe fitters and electricians, could provide a new source of youthful talent.

The idea also appealed to the two-year college, as a way to attract students and put its graduates on equal footing with those from four-year institutions. The program began in January with 26 apprentices from Harold Washington and another two-year institution, Harper College. Three-quarters of them are black or Hispanic, and half of them are women. Another group of 26 will start in January.

Mr. Gutierrez, who is in that inaugural class, now reports to work four days a week on the 12th floor of Aon’s gleaming downtown skyscraper, wearing a suit and tie even though the office dress code is business casual. Two evenings a week, he walks over to the college campus to take classes that teach marketing and workplace skills, including leadership and time management.

Aon covers his $8,000 annual tuition at Harold Washington. It also pays him a salary of $35,000 a year, plus benefits, and provides him with a mentor.

If Mr. Gutierrez completes the two-year program, he’ll have an associate degree in business management with a focus on insurance — as well as a job at Aon.

Taking a Different Path

It’s a chance he never would have had if he had followed the path that seemed laid out for him.

“I grew up in a low-income neighborhood where there was no opportunity to meet people in the kind of job I’m in now,” Mr. Gutierrez says. “For me it was either you finish school, go into building construction, work at McDonald’s or at a hotel.” His parents, who brought him to the United States from Mexico when he was a toddler, work in fast food and in a hotel restaurant.

He was in high school when his girlfriend (now his wife) became pregnant. He entered community college carrying burdens that are common for many first-generation students who are trying to juggle jobs, put food on the table, and take a full load of courses.

A typical day, he says, began at 4 a.m., with a morning shift at McDonald’s, an afternoon of classes, nights at the Holiday Inn, and homework on the bus ride home. He missed spending time with his wife, who works as a dialysis technician, and their daughter, who is now 2.

Those are the kinds of stressors that derail many community-college students. Reluctant to take on debt and living from paycheck to paycheck, many students become overwhelmed and drop out.

In Chicago, 65 percent of public-college students attend community college, but only one in four of them will graduate with a degree within three years. (Community-college officials note that those figures account for only first-time, full-time students and omit many who transfer to other colleges.)

Meanwhile, local industries struggle to find workers to fill jobs that require more education than a high-school degree, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree.

Community colleges nationally, many of which are faced with declining enrollment and high dropout rates, are trying to bridge that gap.

The Aon program is an extension of the Colleges to Careers program, which was started by Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, in 2011 to help local community-college students earn industry-recognized credentials and degrees.

Insurance isn’t a job prospect that draws interest from many teenagers. Mr. Gutierrez admits that when he tells people that’s the field he’s in, it’s sometimes a conversation stopper.

But ever since his AP calculus class went on a field trip to visit local actuaries, he says, he’s been excited about the job possibilities. Eventually he hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science, which applies math and statistics to assess risk in insurance and other industries.

“What I like about actuarial science is it you’re using it to predict the future, and you can use it in all kinds of companies and health care systems,” Mr. Gutierrez says.

He likes working with data and graphics and appreciates being given the opportunity to prove himself while attending a college he can afford.

“We’re just as capable,” he says. “We just don’t have the means to pay for a four-year college.”

Making the Transition

That’s a realization that Aon came to after analyzing its work force, according to Bridget Gainer, vice president for global public affairs.

“We looked at all of our entry-level jobs and asked ourselves, ‘What does require a four-year degree, and what jobs have we just gotten in the habit of requiring a four-year degree for?,’ " she says. “Then we looked for attrition.” They found that some of the jobs that could be done with less schooling had high turnover rates.

Ms. Gainer, who is also a Cook County commissioner, chalks up some of the problem to “the millennial impatience at not moving up quickly enough.” But many young employees were simply bored, she acknowledges. “Basically, we’ve hired someone who invested four years in college,” doing a job that isn’t challenging enough.

The challenge is there, though, for an 18-year-old employee working in a corporate environment for the first time while taking a 12-hour course load.

At least one day a week, Aon’s apprentices meet with a staff member from a nonprofit group, One Million Degrees, who helps them balance their work, academic, and personal lives.

“The hardest part of the transition was getting into the rhythm of the apprenticeship,” Mr. Gutierrez says. “I talked about feeling overwhelmed and having trouble sitting still.” The mentor advised him, when he was feeling that way, to take a five-minute walk and come back. She also told him about Aon’s treadmill desk, from which he sometimes sends emails or works on templates.

Mr. Gutierrez’s job duties have included setting up training sessions for staff members and interns, accompanying his manager to meetings, taking notes, and following up with research.

His work duties are aligned with the classes he’s taking at Harold Washington, which have worked with Aon and other financial-services companies to incorporate more industry-specific coursework into the business curriculum.

“Internships allow students to talk to a potential employer about a contribution they made to a company,” says Paul R. Thompson III, dean of Colleges to Careers at Harold Washington. “An apprenticeship takes it a step further — they’re working near full time for a couple of years while simultaneously pursuing an academic program and receiving professional development.”

Expanding Apprenticeships

One of the reasons some companies have been reluctant to embrace apprenticeships is the risk that apprentices will drop out or leave for another company.

Only about half of those who start multiyear apprenticeship programs complete them, says Robert I. Lerman, a fellow at the Urban Institute. The programs are mostly in construction, and it’s hard to tell how that would translate to the small portion that are in white-collar occupations, he says.

Both President Barack Obama and President Trump have promoted apprenticeships as a way to help students avoid debt burdens while training for some of the estimated six million jobs that are going unfilled. Typically associated with manufacturing and construction, apprenticeships have been expanding in recent years into financial services, health care, and other fields.

The number of apprentices registered with the U.S. Department of Labor jumped from 375,000 in 2013 to more than 600,000 this year.

The Aon apprenticeship is among them. President Trump signed an order in June that allows companies, unions, and other third parties to oversee their own apprentices — a move that prompted some educators to worry that academic standards could slip.

While long a popular pathway in Europe, apprenticeships have been slower to catch on in the United States. Work-force experts blame, in part, a lingering stigma against vocational education, as well as a lack of centralized control and financial support for apprenticeships, which businesses have in places like Germany and Switzerland.

Aon spends about $55,000 per apprentice each year, Ms. Gainer says.

“It is a large investment,” says Mr. Thompson, of Harold Washington, “and that’s partially why we don’t have 100 companies beating down our door saying we want apprentices to come work for us.”

“You have not only the expense associated with salary and tuition,” he goes on, “but you have to find places in your organization where someone can come in at a pretty junior level and make a contribution without disrupting your daily operations, … especially when you’re trying to integrate a big group of students into your organizations.”

Those companies that do join the program find that the savings of a well-trained and committed employee outweigh the cost, he adds.

Mr. Thompson hopes that the success of the Aon apprenticeship will prompt other companies to participate.

“If Aon is very successful,” says the Urban Institute’s Mr. Lerman, “I wouldn’t be surprised if other insurance companies said ‘Hey, they’re on to something.’ "

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.