The average salary for someone who completed an apprenticeship is $60,000 per year. The hourly starting salary of an electrician (the most common apprenticeship) after completing an apprenticeship was $232; for a 40-hour week this translates to $920, substantially higher than the median weekly earnings of $836 for a worker with an Associate degree (of $838 in 2017). Apprenticeships in advanced manufacturing and the trades offer pathways to good jobs with family-sustaining wages and benefits and are a proven and cost-effective model for employers seeking to ensure that they can meet their future need for skilled workers.
>>Read more at the National Center for Women’s Equity in Apprenticeship and Employment
About the author
Ariane Hegewisch is Program Director of Employment and Earnings at IWPR and Scholar in Residence at American University; prior to that she spent two years at IWPR as a scholar-in-residence. She came to IWPR from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings. She is responsible for IWPR’s research on workplace discrimination and is a specialist in comparative human resource management, with a focus on policies and legislative approaches to facilitate greater work life reconciliation and gender equality, in the US and internationally. Prior to coming to the USA she taught comparative European human resource management at Cranfield School of Management in the UK where she was a founding researcher of the Cranet Survey of International HRM, the largest independent survey of human resource management policies and practices, covering 25 countries worldwide. She started her career in local economic development, developing strategies for greater gender equality in employment and training in local government in the UK. She has published many papers and articles and co-edited several books, including ‘Women, work and inequality: The challenge of equal pay in a deregulated labour market”. She is German and has a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the IDS, Sussex.