Amidst robust growth and historically low unemployment rates, the City is determined to ensure that New Yorkers from all backgrounds can benefit from the City’s good job opportunities.

Through its Career Pathways initiative, the City has built, and will expand, a series of workforce programs that bridge the opportunity gap through education, training and job matching, putting more New Yorkers onto career pathways into the middle class.

• Industry Partnerships are a series of business advisory councils that provide strategic and tactical input into new and existing job training and preparation programs. The City will expand these partnerships to scale successful programs (like the Web Development Fellowship) and develop new training programs to help connect New Yorkers to quality jobs.
• The City will work with its institutions of higher education, particularly the City University of New York, to expand college curriculum to match employer needs and incorporate industry-specific training.
• Deliver “bridge” training combined with adult basic education, so New Yorkers can get their high school equivalency and prepare for a job at the same time.
• Increase the diversity of local talent tapped for these jobs through targeted outreach and training.
• Develop and launch ApprenticeNYC, a new employer-training partnership model that allows New Yorkers to get the hands-on experience they need while placing them in a career-ladder profession.

ApprenticeNYC

ApprenticeNYC will build on the employer relationships we have developed through our Industry Partnerships, and create a new training model that combines traditional workforce education and training with on-the-job learning provided by employers who have already hired the trainees. By combining the traditional new employee “learning curve” period with pre-hire technical training that builds a job-ready new hire, employers gain the certainty of a talented pipeline of new employees, and workers gain the certainty of employment and a skills that will increase their opportunities beyond the apprenticeship.

ApprenticeNYC will begin as a multi-year pilot in three sectors with employers who have been partners on other City programs and have specifically expressed interest in partnering to build new hiring and training models. As an example, Spotify developed its New York City Technology Fellowship after noticing a gap between their traditional hiring methods and the high potential candidates from underrepresented backgrounds that were excelling in bootcamps but lacked formal professional engineering experience. Building on programs like this, the City will partner with employers like Spotify, and others in the tech, industrial and healthcare industries, to build out a new model of apprenticeships, with the first cohorts beginning in spring 2018.