The Questions Your State Should Be Asking to Bring Industry to the Table

Two of the biggest challenges for WBL at the secondary level are intertwined: how do we scale these experiences so every student has an opportunity for high-quality WBL, and how do we more deeply and intentionally engage employers to invest in, design, and value this work? 

Our current practices are foundational but insufficient to solve these challenges. Research (in the form of a landscape scan and employer focus groups) conducted in support of the national Launch initiative revealed the range of incentives and engagement strategies that states are using to recruit employers, especially for deeper experiences like internships and apprenticeships. The states with the most robust strategies are using a combination of financial incentives, barrier removal efforts, and capacity-building to strengthen the overall appeal of WBL. However, even these comprehensive approaches have made only incremental progress at helping to scale WBL.

A clear takeaway from the research: the incentives and strategies we think will convince employers to come along aren’t enough. States should be asking these questions to push beyond foundational practices to compel employers to champion and invest in WBL.

Question #1: What are the actual costs associated with WBL in our state, and what have the returns looked like for participating employers?

Because hosting students on a worksite comes at a cost, financial incentives seem a natural way to minimize the financial responsibility that employers take on. In fact, approximately half of states offer some form of financial support for employers who host WBL experiences, often in the form of tax credits or grant programs. Maryland, for example, has used a number of financial incentives to recruit employers. Those participating in the Maryland Technology Internship Program (MTIP) can be reimbursed for half of an intern’s wage and up to $5,500 annually per intern. Additionally, under the Maryland Apprenticeship Incentive Program, Registered Apprenticeship sponsors or employers may receive up to $7,500 for each newly registered high school-level apprentice to offset eligible training expenses. 

For employers, that financial support is appreciated but not always a compelling recruitment strategy. Instead, breaking down the actual cost of hosting a student and providing authentic documentation of what the return on investment (ROI) has looked like for their peers, including the benefits employers receive as a result of their front-end investment into student learning. As one Advanced Manufacturing employer put it:

“What it’s going to take to make sense to employers is just identifying those [benefits], because [WBL] does reduce your training time, cuts it drastically. If you’ve got the foundation that’s already been built by the school itself, your onboarding efficiency…we have seen improvements across our KPIs. So [WBL] doesn’t just impact retention, it’s going to impact production, quality, safety, all of those things.”

Communicating the ROI for WBL allows states to reframe employer incentives as an investment in their talent pipeline, rather than a “thank you” for charitable work. To keep employers at the table, WBL must be messaged as a core, long-term talent pipeline strategy in which both state and employers are investing and seeing the benefits of those investments in their bottom line. 

Question #2: What is your WBL communication strategy, especially around commonly perceived barriers for employers?

Anyone who has spent time talking to employers about WBL has heard the same types of real and perceived challenges: concerns around legal barriers, uncertainty around liability, and navigating administrative “red tape.” Our landscape scan found several examples of how many states have already taken active steps to remove these common barriers. Texas passed HB 639 in 2017, authorizing public schools to purchase liability and accident insurance that covers both the CTE student and the employer during WBL activities, while in Indiana, the Work and Learn Resource Hub acts as a centralized clearinghouse where employers can see clear breakdowns of labor laws, in addition to finding WBL coordinators and accessing pre-vetted training agreements. 

In several of our conversations, employers were unaware of the policies their state agencies had put in place to address some of their commonly-named challenges. It was clear that some of what they believed limited their ability to bring students onto worksites was mostly perception – both on the part of the employer and their partnering school district. One Healthcare employer reflected on this conversation, saying,

“I think there are some things that we believe to be barriers, or things that, because this is the way it’s always been done, we just think that you just can’t. And when you dig into it, it’s really that’s not the case. It’s just that that’s the way we’ve always done it, and that the opportunity exists there, and we just have to see where those opportunities lie.”

Education leaders often cite employer awareness as a challenge but don’t spend enough time designing a responsive communication strategy. If a state passes a policy but nobody knows about it, the policy is irrelevant. The same goes for resource development. Materials meant to provide important information can often sit on a website, gathering metaphorical dust without a broader distribution plan. A strategic employer communication strategy can provide some framing and guidance to ensure the information is consistently getting to the right people.

Question #3: How are you coordinating across education and workforce to eliminate redundancy, streamline processes, and better communicate with employers?

State and regional partners are both essential for engaging and retaining employers, but without coordination, their efforts can overlap, and roles can get muddled (see the new coordinated employer engagement framework from Colorado Succeeds). At the state level, multi-agency, collaborative models help align career education directly with regional economic demands and create a more stable policy environment that can reduce employer whiplash. For example, Delaware Pathways, a partnership of the Delaware Department of Education, the Delaware Department of Labor, and Delaware Technical Community College, created the Office of Work-Based Learning to support essential functions, such as building industry councils and signing master agreements with large employers.

At the regional level, intermediary organizations can provide several important functions that can make the process of designing, building, and maintaining a WBL experience easier for employers and districts. This makes them key partners for states looking to scale WBL and, in fact, many have made moves to better leverage employers in this space. The Iowa Intermediary Network is managed by Iowa Workforce Development and acts as a single point of contact for regional industries, matching students to employers across 15 community college regions. In Colorado, the Work-Based Learning Incentive Program works through regional intermediaries to provide financial incentives to employers statewide that offer high-quality work-based learning experiences, funded by the legislature.

Employers shared with us that they rely on organizations that have intermediary functions for important information, guidance, and partnership:

“[The chamber] is definitely the glue that’s pulled a lot of us [industry peers] together…they just actively, just continuously pull us together. Doesn’t matter if, if they’re changing some management or leadership, I think they have a great handoff between the two. They have a long term initiative, and that is just workforce development, making sure that people want to come and work in a community, and that there’s plenty of options for the skills that they have.”

Another added:

“[My peers and I] also formed a… Manufacturers Association where we as employers got together and we identified work based learning as one of the pillars of that organization. How do we get involved? How do we become good industry partners? Because I think for employers, we have to make sure that we get a seat at the table then, that we’re really sharing what the industry needs and what we need for our future growth, so that the schools are offering the programs that are going to continue to feed industry.”

Leveraging these organizations as coordinators across education and workforce systems can help streamline complex processes, reduce employer frustration, and provide a single, reliable point of contact that makes participating in WBL more accessible and sustainable for businesses of all sizes.

Scaling high-quality work-based learning requires moving beyond foundational practices like financial incentives. The potential for scale lies in states’ ability to fundamentally understand the ROI for employers, clearly communicate the removal of systemic barriers, and foster more seamless coordination across education and workforce systems. It also requires treating WBL as the core talent development strategy that it is. State leaders need to ask critical questions that shift employer engagement from a charitable request into a mutually beneficial partnership.