The Future of Work: Building the Case for Apprenticeships with Ryan Craig, MD of Achieve Partners

– Ryan Craig

In South Africa, it’s very common for high-school graduates to take a gap year to volunteer and explore potential career paths to pursue. This approach to career planning contrasts sharply with the U.S. system, where students are often funneled directly into traditional college pathways where 70% face negative outcomes—either dropping out or graduating into underemployment while racking up staggering student debt.

In this episode of the On Work and Revolution podcast, we dive deep into the urgent need for expanding apprenticeships.Ryan Craig, Managing Director at Achieve Partners and author, joins us to discuss why apprenticeships are the key to providing students with practical, debt-free routes to successful careers, and how this could reshape the workforce for the better.

We dig into:

✓ The staggering statistics behind student debt and underemployment
✓ Why apprenticeships are thriving in countries like the UK and Germany and what we can learn from them
✓ How AI and automation are transforming entry-level jobs, making apprenticeships more crucial than ever

About our guest, Ryan Craig:

Ryan is a Managing Director at Achieve Partners and was formerly an MD at University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in education and workforce regularly appears in the biweekly Gap Letter, Forbes, and Inside Higher Education. He is the author of the book Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (2023). He is also author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. Ryan’s first book was College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring. Ryan is a co-founder of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships across the U.S. economy and is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus. His prior experience in higher education was at Columbia University. Ryan also founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.

Ryan received bachelor’s degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.

Helpful Links:

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