Registered apprenticeship programs represent the lifeblood of the construction industry. These vital workforce development programs—which typically do not require a nickel of student debt or government tax dollars—build worker skills while offering career pathways to good-paying jobs for blue-collar Americans. These programs are also key to the long-run sustainability of the U.S. construction industry, making it critical that apprenticeship programs recruit and retain capable and dedicated apprentices.

In recent years, many industry stakeholders have increasingly focused on recruiting more women and workers of color to construction apprenticeship training. These efforts are designed not only to increase diversity and access to good jobs, but also to expand the pipeline of committed apprentices who will become the next generation of skilled trades workers in the United States.

Assessing diversity outcomes within these registered apprenticeship training programs, however, has long encountered a problem: Data collected by the U.S. Department of Labor from states and programs are often incomplete and notoriously riddled with inaccuracies. However, our new book—The State of Registered Apprenticeship Training in the Construction Trades—has resolved many of these data issues and offers a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind examination of the U.S. construction industry’s registered apprenticeship training programs.1 Our analysis reveals two broad trends in the area of diversity among construction apprentices:

• Women, Hispanic workers, and workers of color have higher participation and completion rates in union-based registered apprenticeship programs compared with nonunion programs.
• Across the entire industry, the share of women and Hispanic workers in registered apprenticeship programs grew from 2015 through 2021, though the share of apprentices of color declined during this period.

To detail our two key takeaways, Figure 1 highlights that women represented a small, but growing, share of new registrations in construction apprenticeship programs between 2015 and 2021 across the 42 states for which data was available.2 The figure also highlights that women comprised a higher share of new registrants in “joint” programs—those jointly administered by labor unions and respective union contractor associations—compared with “nonjoint” (i.e., nonunion) programs.

Assessing the success of women apprentices as measured by their rates of program completion, Figure 2 offers two important conclusions. First, regardless of program sponsor, women apprentices typically have a lower completion rate than their male counterparts. However, the graph details that women apprentices are much more likely to be successful in a union-backed program (37.6% completion rate) than in a nonunion program (23.4%).

Figures 3 and 4 replicate the above analyses regarding apprenticeship participation and success by race. The first figure highlights that the share of workers of color in registered programs in the U.S. construction industry stagnated somewhat between 2015 and 2019, and then declined following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.3 The latter figure highlights that Black apprentices and other apprentices of color exhibit much higher completion rates in union-based programs than in nonunion programs.

In terms of ethnicity, Figure 5 shows the growing participation of Hispanic workers in registered apprenticeship programs in both union and nonunion programs in the United States. Further, the graph reveals that Hispanic workers comprised a larger share of new registrants in union programs in 2021 (33.0%) compared with nonunion programs (25.6%).

Figure 6 extends the pattern offered in earlier graphs in highlighting that Hispanic apprentices have higher completion rates in union-backed programs (40.6%) compared with nonunion programs (30.1%).

Notes

1. All proceeds from book sales support the Institute for Construction Employment Research (ICERES), a nonprofit and nonpartisan network of academic scholars and other researchers developing high-quality research on construction labor issues in the United States and Canada. For more on ICERES, its analysis of apprenticeship data in the industry, and potential state-by-state analyses, please visit iceres.org.

2. Data offered in this blog cover all 50 states excluding those jurisdictions where data was not publicly available: Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Vermont, and Virginia.

3. This category includes African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.