In today´s episode of ‘Your Business Greatness’, host Simone Sloan, Executive Strategist, Founder, and Executive Coach and DEI Consultant at “Your Choice Coach,” speaks with Kim Nichols, CEO, and Founder of Franklin Apprenticeships. Kim is on a mission to unlock the potential of the American workforce by creating a new route for tech careers via apprenticeship and work-based education.
Podcast Highlights:
- When Kim first started the company she was working with a couple of apprenticeship experts from the UK who were helping to educate. They had been consulting with the US Department of Labor for a couple of years and then they transitioned those relationships over to her, but she also had an opportunity to learn about apprenticeships in other countries. She went through German, Swiss, and Australian models, and further dove deep into the UK model which is something that aligned best in the US. It's an employer-led model versus coming up through the education system, so it made a lot of sense to replicate that model in the US.
- People that apply to Kim’s program take a career fit assessment as a first step, and that determines whether they have the aptitude for the tech job. So those that have the aptitude, then participate in a pre-apprenticeship program, and that allows them to test out the occupation. Those people that have completed the pre-apprenticeship then participate in interviews with various big companies, and they feel good about it because they've already done the job.
- One of the challenges was that during COVID when companies had stopped hiring and there were layoffs, Kim’s goal at Franklin was to not lose any of their employees. So after some Googling, they found a work Share Plan where they could reduce their employees’ time to 75% and then leverage some unemployment insurance to help carry them was helpful. They also had to step back and take a look at their model. They were able to repurpose some grant funds that they had to deliver pre-apprenticeship which was to give all these people that were laid off from the retail and hospitality sector during COVID to give them the skills that they needed to start a new career, one that wasn't going to go away.
Words of Wisdom: Kim advises you to believe in your outcomes, just go for it, and be more open to opportunities.
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Connect to Kim Nichols@ Franklin Apprenticeships: Website LinkedIn
