Using Mastery and Apprenticeship to Tackle the Skills Gap

Introduction

Mastery is comprehensive skill or knowledge in a given subject or field. It is something we all aspire to in our respective fields and hobbies. It’s what qualifies us for the best work, and its journey makes life satisfying.

There is a growing skills gap in America. A growing percentage of people are either overskilled and underemployed, or underskilled and can’t find desirable work.

This is mainly due to society’s poor valuing of mastery. If governments, businesses and schools were more incentivized to understand and leverage this concept, our jobs and the people working them might be much more aligned.

This article seeks to examine this problem, provide an example for working through it, and offer ideas for solving it.

Mastery and the 10,000 hour rule

Success isn’t created overnight. And mastery of any craft certainly isn’t a product of raw talent.

Anyone who has read Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell can cite the 10,000 hour rule for achieving greatness in any field. The main idea is that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice of a craft will make you an expert.

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Whether or not you believe in this exact number of hours achieve master status, the simplicity of its message is clear: the harder you work at something, the better you will get. As André Bouquet notes:

Extraordinary success depends on talent, hard work, and being in the right place at the right time, among other things. In Outliers, Gladwell contends that, to truly master any skill, leaning on various pieces of research, requires about 10,000 concentrated hours. If you can get those hours in early, and be in a position to exploit them, then you are an outlier.

Robert Greene dives deeper into this concept in his book Mastery.

We enter a new field with excitement, but also fear about how much there is to learn ahead of us. The greatest danger here is boredom, impatience, fear, and confusion. Once we stop observing and learning, the process towards mastery comes to a halt.

But if we manage these emotions and keep pushing forward, we start to gain fluency, and we master the basic skills allowing us to take on bigger and better challenges.

Eventually, we move from student to practitioner. We use our own ideas and experiments, getting feedback in the process. We start to use our own style.

Then as we continue for years we make the leap to mastery. We develop an intuitive sense of the skill and have mastered it to the point of being able to innovate and break the rules.

How well do schools prepare us for the real world?

If mastery, or any level of skill, is achieved by racking up deliberate practice, then what role do schools play in getting kids started down this path?

It takes 13 years to go from kindergarten to high school graduation. Taking an average of 180 days a year at 7 hours a day yields us over 16,000 hours. And this doesn’t count homework and other extracurricular activities that go into the education experience.

So, are all high school graduates masters? Of course not. The school system is designed for breadth, not depth. A little exposure to a wide range of important subjects teaches kids how to learn and gives them a basic understanding of the critical fields of study in life.

And because the 10,000 hour rule demands deliberate, focused practice in an area, the 16,000 hours compiled during the first 18 years in life do little to earn someone mastery in a particular field.

But we’d all agree that these years of schooling aren’t a waste of time. They certainly prepare children with foundations for learning, an overview of a wide range of subjects, and some basic life skills to help them function in the real world. These are the kinds of skills required no matter what field you pursue.

“There are many different points of view on this topic,” says Jonathan Cohen, cofounder and president of the National School Climate Center. “I think that my view, and most people’s view, is that the purpose of education is to support children in developing the skills, the knowledge, and the dispositions that will allow them to be responsible, contributing members of their community—their democratically-informed community. Meaning, to be a good friend, to be a good mate, to be able to work, and to contribute to the well-being of the community.”

Not only should children learn civic knowledge—how the electoral college works, the history of political parties, and so on—but they also need to master civic skills, which include respecting others, working collaboratively, acting in a way that is fair and just, and being an active participant in the life of the community, Cohen says.

Taking a generalized approach here, we can assume that a person, by the time they reach 18, has achieved roughly 0% potential mastery of any craft. (This obviously excludes persistent practice or training in a specific area, that many children take on, but for illustrative purposes we’re examining the role of a standard curriculum without extracurriculars).

If we all graduate high school with no progression toward mastery in a vocation, then certainly higher education institutions get us there, right?

College’s role in mastery

A typical four-year college degree is 1,800 hours. And a degree has a specific subject matter and career path attached to it.

That is 15 credit hours a week, times 15 weeks, times 2 semesters a year, times 4 years.

15 x 15 x 2 x 4 = 1,800

18% of the way toward mastery! Not so fast…

Subtract 2 years of general education courses and electives. A business major doesn’t really attribute her geology or biology classes toward mastery of a business craft. But marketing and accounting classes certainly help make up part of this focused learning.

Also subtract any peripheral business classes. An accounting student, after all, probably won’t need multiple marketing and management courses to become a master accountant. They certainly add to the overall business skill of the individual, but it’s not focused practice toward a craft—in this case, accounting.

Now, some majors probably contribute more than average toward mastering a skill, but we can generalize and assume that less than half a student’s study hours while attending a 4-year university count toward this number. Let’s call it 900. That’s now less than 10%.

A graduate, at 22 years of age, now has almost 10% mastery toward his profession. No wonder it’s so hard to find a job out of college. If I’m choosing between a college graduate with 10% mastery and someone who’s graduated college and worked for two years afterward (10% plus 4,000 working hours, equaling 50%), at similar costs, I’m choosing the second person.

Now compare a college graduate who pursues a profession completely unrelated from his major. Let’s take an English major, now getting a job as a salesman.

The four years of college add up to effectively 0% mastery of sales. Meanwhile, a high-school graduate who starts selling vacuums door to door right out of school, has now racked up 8,000 working hours over this same time-frame, and is 80% toward mastering sales.

And most of this 80% is in the form of soft skills and other intangibles you can’t really get from studying text books and taking classes.

Two people who end up doing the same job now have completely different circumstances. College graduate has 0% skills (unless they did really well selling candy for baseball fundraisers growing up), average student loan debt over $30,000, and no savings from having worked.

High school graduate now has 80% mastery of door-to-door sales, no student debt, and savings and potentially other assets as a result of working these four years.

The current workforce environment

Fifty-three percent of all jobs are middle skill, requiring some education between high school diploma and a four-year degree, according to the National Skills Coalition. However, only 43% of all workers are trained at this level.

Additionally, 30-50% of college graduates at least begin post-collegiate careers in positions categorized as underemployed for them.

Source: Forbes

Avoiding the underemployment trap is easier for some students than others. Over half (54%) of psychology majors have a first job that does not require a college degree, and over two-thirds of those remain underemployed after five years. First-job underemployment rates are similarly high for biology and biomedicine majors (51%) and education majors (50%).

Even highly-regarded STEM majors are not immune to underemployment. Three in ten engineering majors have a first job that does not require a college degree. Eighteen percent are underemployed both in their first jobs and in the jobs they have five years after leaving school.

The persistence of underemployment throughout a graduate’s career is unsurprising. Jobs that require college-level skills help graduates develop and expand those skills, leading to even better jobs later on. However, graduates who don’t apply the skills they learned in college may see those skills atrophy, making it even harder to land a college-appropriate job further down the road.

Underemployment is distinct from the related phenomenon of degree inflation. Degree inflation occurs when employers demand college degrees for jobs that don’t require college-level skills. According to a Harvard Business School report issued last year, more than six million jobs are at risk of degree inflation, and the phenomenon has only accelerated since the Great Recession.

It is difficult to determine precisely whether a particular job “requires” a college degree, and consequently measuring underemployment is a thorny process. The Burning Glass report considers a college graduate to be appropriately employed if a majority of job postings for her occupation requested a college degree, and underemployed if that is not the case.

But degree inflation means some graduates do not put their college degrees to work on the job, even if employers request such credentials in job postings. Due to degree inflation, some jobs classified as college-level might not in fact require college-level skills. Therefore, true underemployment rates could be even higher than those estimated by Burning Glass.

Here we see an interesting paradox… we motivate and even seem to incentivize people to go to college, at all costs, because it’s the best thing for their careers. However, after graduation, almost half work significant periods in jobs they are now overqualified for. At the same time, about half the total jobs that are classified as middle-skill now don’t have enough qualified (as opposed to over-qualified) candidates.

What was the point of this additional learning? Especially if it contributed very little to that person’s mastery in a field…

It seems the proper level of education for this middle range of jobs is somewhere between high school and college education… that informal set of learning that is hardest to structure on a broad level.

This assumption is evident in a report by Select International that highlights a skills gap emerging in the American workplace.

Headaches from vacant positions. Training and development challenges. Increased turnover. The skills gap refers to the gap between the actual knowledge, skills, and abilities of candidates or employees, and the knowledge, skills, and abilities that employers want or need their employees to have. The gap is growing. Though there are over seven million people unemployed in the US, they may not possess the right KSAs to obtain these open jobs or to perform at a sufficient level.

The report goes on to state 80% of Americans believe there is currently a skills gap, with 35% feeling personally affected by it. And this costs upwards of $160 billion a year, according to the Center for Economic Research.

What are the skills that employers most commonly cite as lacking among prospective new hires? Critical thinking and analytical reasoning, skills best developed on the job or in some other formal work setting…not from a textbook.

This disconnect helps create an environment where over 42% of recent college graduates are currently underemployed. The skills people are chasing (e.g., college degrees in various, yet unprofitable fields) are clearly not in sync with available jobs and profitable career paths.

Sixty percent of U.S. employers have job openings that stay vacant for 12 weeks or longer. This came from a survey in 2017 by CareerBuilder. In the survey, HR managers say that the average cost from having extended job vacancies is $800,000 or more annually.

Cost of hiring and turnover

Given the major cost of hiring skilled workers and the even higher cost of rapid turnover, it makes sense to hire the person with the most experience and best skillset required by the job. But if the current system is failing us so badly, then what is the best way to sync up people’s skills with relevant jobs?

For people starting at 0, the best way might involve pre-apprenticeship programs.

From the National Skills Coalition:

Underrepresented workers without adequate industry experience often need pre-employment or pre-apprenticeship training before they reach the skill level necessary to enter work-based learning programs. But, training alone may not be sufficient to ensure success.

Pre-apprenticeship programs that provide both training and access to child care can offer an important on-ramp to an apprenticeship pathway for a broad range of workers. Once in an apprenticeship, child care continues to be an important support for ensuring participant success since starting wages are lower than those apprentices can expect to make once they’ve completed their program.

Apprenticeship and work-based learning can help address this disconnect, enabling workers to earn wages while learning new skills. For companies in desperate need of new workers, these programs immediately place workers on site. Businesses can align training with the skills they need at any moment and adjust training quickly as their workforce needs change. The approach has been shown to reinforce employee engagement, leading to better morale, higher retention, and lower turnover.

For low-wage workers or those not attached to the workforce, work-based learning offers an on-ramp to a career that includes a paying job from the start, and often leads to a recognized credential. Access to work-based learning opportunities in high-wage industries like construction, manufacturing, transportation, or health care leads to long term positive employment outcomes for people with barriers to employment.

And job training programs that include an on-the-job training component and credential attainment have been successful at improving wages and retention outcomes for people with low incomes and low skills.

Despite these benefits, the U.S. falls far behind other competitor nations in using work-based learning to train workers for in-demand, middle skill jobs. To address this underutilization and expand the pipeline of workers with access to workbased learning, U.S. policy should better support access to pre-apprenticeship programs and affordable child care that help women, parents, and underrepresented populations succeed.

Here are some best practices that make up successful pre-employment programs, according to the National Skills Coalition:

The case for these types of programs

It isn’t hard to see the pass-through of high-tuition costs onto employers. Four-year degrees earn young workers (sometimes) arbitrarily higher salaries than would-be hires straight out of high school. They have, after all, completed accredited programs demonstrating competence in a field.

But what is the premium paid for such competence especially knowing most job-training can only be learned on the job?

Take fictional student John Jones. He’s pursuing a college degree in computer programming. To pay for his $100k tuition, he takes out a student loan for all of it.

Using our generalization above, after four years of college he’s racked up a potential 900 hours toward his mastery of computer programming. He enters the workforce in a relatively attractive position for employers, having completed an accredited degree in the field they’re looking to hire for. But to attract graduates in this field, employers must pay a salary premium to bring them on board.

Compare this to Tim Smith, who graduated high school and worked various low-level computer programming jobs over the next four years, building up focused levels of mastery. Counting even 50% of his hours worked over this time, he has accumulated 4,000 hours of focused skills – bringing him to 40% mastery of this skill—relatively more attractive than John Jones.

A potential employer might look at both candidates (if objective comparable information is available) like this:

The employer could look at both candidates in terms of cost per skill (a theoretical cost for each percentage unit of mastery). On this basis, Tim Smith looks like a bargain. And the $65k it would take to attract him would do the job, having earned lower salaries in his previous entry-type jobs.

Furthermore, it appears the premium paid for a college graduate in this field equals $10,000 ($75-$65k). But if you think about it, with relative experience considered, the premium is really $268,320…

This is all theoretical math, of course, but if you take the $8,333 cost per unit of mastery for the graduate, and multiply it by 40%, the level of mastery gained by the non-graduate, you get a total theoretical salary of over $333k!

Companies may start to decide that this premium isn’t worth it, or at the very least, lower it to a more reasonable variance from a non-graduate. There needs to be a way to more adequately match salaries with skill sets. This solves not only work-related problems, but discrimination-related problems as well (a topic for another day).

What can companies do to level the playing field?

Once companies start realizing they don’t need to overpay for workers, they can instead create apprenticeship or other pre-work programs to train pipelines of workers for their entire industry.

Maybe instead of having computer programming as a major across all universities, Google, Apple, and Facebook can create a consortium of pre-work training programs designed to earn valid credentials in the popular field, at a fraction of the cost of going to a four-year school.

Companies could tailor these programs to more adequately focus on the mastery side of the education experience, in lieu of the peripheral stuff. Cut out general education requirements. Cut out extracurricular bonuses. Focus on the skills that a person needs to work a job. Eliminate the premium.

Invest in people early on, eliminate unnecessary bloat in the education cost structure, and streamline the process from training to job. It’s systemic in nature but should be easy enough to see the positive potential of such an idea.

Hidden Value, Surplus Capacity

Revisiting the concept of non-college graduates working to build up skills, we can examine a case where excess capacity may exist in the form of hidden value.

Consider the high school graduate working an entry-level job at a local restaurant. This could involve waiting tables, working the kitchen, bussing tables, etc. Over the next few years the person may aspire to something higher but wonder how such a career shift could be possible, without going to college.

Without even realizing, this person may have built up a concentrated amount of people skills, which can be parlayed into sales, human resources, and a number of other potential fields. Two years of waiting tables may be worth the same amount as half a college degree or more in the relevant skills related to human resources.

Let’s call this 5% of mastery. Not a lot but certainly more than zero.

Now we’ve already estimated a college graduate typically has around 9% mastery. So there’s really now only a gap of 4% that needs to be made up to make this person qualified for entry-level HR jobs.

Converting this to hours, an apprenticeship program lasting at least 400 hours should do the trick. Make it a whole year and the candidate is more than qualified to do the type of work typically awarded to college graduates.

This kind of idea makes you wonder how much excess capacity, in terms of job skills, are sitting out there untapped because people don’t have the resources to level up.

A theoretical talent surplus does exist. It’s just a matter of converting this into qualified talent to fill vacant jobs.

Conclusion

A comprehensive understanding of mastery helps match people with jobs. Education should not be as boxed off as it is. And people should have shorter routes toward viable careers.

Their accumulated skills, no matter how they get them, can and should be deployed in further development. All experience is valuable, and as soon as we can quantify and understand skills, as opposed to credentials, we’ll have an easier time hiring, training and developing workers.

This is a huge problem. And it won’t be fixed overnight. But with rising school costs, and changing workforce dynamics, the time for change is now.

Everyone should be on some sort of apprenticeship track. No matter what field. Some fields do it better than others—e.g., carpenters, electricians, doctors. The rest need to catch up.

Cut out the waste. Leverage people’s skills. And create a much more efficient and valuable economy.