College IT Apprenticeships Provide Actionable Learning Experiences

“Whether you’re the governor, the mayor or an educator, everyone acknowledges the IT space is something they want their local labor market to be fluent in,” Worth says. “With some of these more modern opportunities in registered apprenticeships, it’s much more relevant to what is actually being practiced in the field today.”

The University of Cincinnati has a long history of pairing students with hands-on work opportunities. Dating back to 1906, its cooperative education initiative, often referred to simply as co-op, lets students attend classes and work full-time jobs relating to their majors during alternating semesters.

As part of a collaboration with several schools that are regional partners or that reached out when creating their own work-integrated learning programs — including Xavier University, the Wentworth Institute of Technology and Johnson C. Smith University — UC created the NEXT Apprenticeship Program.

The university debuted the program in January 2020, according to Aaron Burdette, assistant professor and faculty director for workforce development and continuing education at UC.

“We recognized there was a talent shortfall, and if we wanted to maintain our competitiveness, we needed to be able to fill critical industries,” Burdette says. “IT and IT-associated industries were struggling at the time for talent, and many people were saying, ‘This job is something we can get you into almost immediately; you just need to have some foundational competencies.’”

DISCOVER: Computer science education provides recession-proof job opportunities.

Students don’t have to be traditional technology majors to take advantage of the program. Advisers work with participants to design academic plans that will help them obtain the necessary certifications, experience or other elements to qualify for roles as computer and IT system support technicians or cybersecurity analysts.

To accommodate individual learning preferences, UC provides tech-related instruction in a variety of ways, using Dell computers and Intel systems. Students might study cybersecurity principles, for example, by completing challenges in a 3D simulation.

“We recognize that, depending on the type of learner and where they’re coming from, they’re going to want to engage in their education a little bit differently,” Burdette says. “Our military veterans and transitioning and active-duty individuals worked really well in the virtual environment because they had a more ‘I need to train physically’ mindset.”

UC was able to tap into relationships it had previously formed with employers through its co-op offering to arrange the NEXT Apprenticeship Program’s experiential learning component.

“We were able to converse with employers by saying, “Hey, what do you think about hiring these apprentices?’” Burdette says. “We had a lot go through companies such as Kroger and Paycor. We were able to really build off established internship and co-op programs within those companies.”

Some students worked with nonprofit organizations that didn’t have internal IT staff but found during the COVID-19 pandemic that they needed help from trained professionals.

“They were using our apprentices to set up a lot of that digital footprint,” Burdette says. “That helped these nonprofits move past providing traditional services to being digitally based nonprofits.”

Programs Can Prime Students to Become Outstanding Apprentices

Northern Virginia Community College, which launched a now-shuttered IT apprenticeship program in 2021, introduced a slightly different take on the apprenticeship model this year.

When memory chip manufacturer Micron Technology announced in April that it planned to offer an apprenticeship program in Manassas, Va., for students enrolled in an approved technical certificate or two-year associate degree program, NOVA began assembling a complementary pre-apprenticeship program, according to Josh Labrie, director of NOVA SySTEMic, which supplies support services for STEM students.