Happy New Year! My team and I work very hard to take care of you, our awesome members, to provide you with all of the benefits of IAPMO membership. Every year my team and I determine our goals and objectives and then we plan our strategy to meet these goals on your behalf. This year, among our objectives are to grow our membership, increase our visibility, and reach out to our industry leaders so that we can become more united, more impactful.
Growing our membership is a two-pronged approach. I want to reach out to those individuals who are established in the industry, and I want to reach out to the apprentices of our industry so that we may mentor them as they progress. Recently, I came across an article published in a Dallas newspaper. It profiled a 17-year-old young man from Hamlin, Texas, a junior in high school who heard about a program that taught him a profession while he got paid being an apprentice. This apprenticeship was a path into the workforce that suddenly everyone was talking about as an alternative to college. The article talked about how this young man asked his school principal about apprenticeship programs, and the principal replied, “You will have to find it on your own.” That was disheartening to read. Thankfully, the young man did not give up. He found a local HVAC company who was looking for apprentices, and he started his career. This story spotlights a big hitch in the movement for apprenticeship, even as they are being pushed by policymakers and politicians of all stripes and expanded beyond the trades to jobs in tech and other industries.
Apprenticeships combine paid on-the-job training with classroom time. Apprenticeships have benefited from growing public skepticism about the need for college. Only 1 in 4 adults now say that having a four-year college degree is extremely or very important in finding a good paying job, according to the PEW Research Center. The ECMC Foundation states that nearly two thirds of 14- to 18-year-olds say that their ideal education would involve learning skills on the job, as apprentices. The U.S. Department of Labor states there are 679,142 Americans in apprenticeships currently, an increase of 89 percent from 2014. Compare that to the 18 million Americans enrolled in universities around the country and less than four percent are in apprenticeship programs.
I have been with IAPMO for 33 years and I have watched this industry evolve. I have met with industry leaders, I have met with union leadership, I have met and gotten to know many of you who have risen to positions that shape our industry. I want to reach out to each one of you, and I want to ask for your support. Help me grow our industry, help me reach out to our young apprentices, help me find our next leaders who will carry the torch for years to come.
Let’s do this in 2025. I’ll be talking to you in the months to come. I look forward to building our industry together!
Tricia Megee
Last modified: February 5, 2025