Tennessee Department of Labor Pushing Apprenticeships During National Apprenticeship Week

The Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development (TNDOL) is celebrating National Apprenticeship Week, which began Monday and runs through Friday.

“It’s National Apprenticeship Week. [Gov. Bill Lee) talks about the importance of apprenticeships in creating a critical pipeline of skilled workers in Tennessee. The Governor also signed a proclamation marking this as Apprenticeship Week in Tennessee,” the department said in a Monday video posted to X, formerly Twitter.

“This National Apprenticeship Week, we’re celebrating Tennessee’s skilled workforce and the important role that apprenticeships play in training Tennesseeans for hands on careers,” Lee said in the video. “Here in the Volunteer State, we’ve made significant investment in vocational investments since day one, so that every Tennesseean has unlimited opportunity, including a billion dollar investment in our state’s College of Applied Technology just this year.”

“We’ve seen tremendous success in skilling Tennesseeans through Apprenticeship Tennessee, a program that’s connected 8,000 individuals to apprenticeships, including 3,000 training new apprentices in the last year,” Lee said.

Apprenticeship Tennessee’s website says the state has 384 active apprenticeship programs and will add 47 new ones by the end of this year.

In October, Lee signed a proclamation recognizing National Apprenticeship Week.

Throughout the week, TNDOL has celebrated companies and skilled workers who are coming together to train employees in trades.

“It’s National Apprenticeship Week and Travis Electric is making it happen! This is a great example of how apprenticeships work,” the department said Monday. “These electrical apprentices work full-time while attending in-shop classes two nights a week. The company even built its own schoolhouse for training.”

“It’s National Apprenticeship Week. Today’s program spotlight is from the TCAT Dickson. They’re training Electromechanical Technicians in conjunction with Nyrstar. This is a five-year Registered Apprenticeship Program,” the department said Wednesday.

TCAT is the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, to which Lee referred in his Monday message.

As Lee said, the state invested $1 billion into the program. The governor announced the historic investment in his February State of the State speech.

He said, “This year, I propose that we complete Tennessee’s TCAT Master Plan. To do that, we’ll expand and improve 16 existing TCATs, replace seven outdated facilities, and build six brand new TCATs at strategic locations across our state. Our goal is to train 10,000 new skilled workers a year. To achieve this, we’re proposing $1 billion in this budget – the largest investment in our technical colleges in state history.”

These investments included:

• $370.8M to update outdated facilities in seven TCAT campuses state-wide
• $386.2M to invest in new buildings, expansions and improvements to sixteen current TCAT campuses
• $147.5M to build six new TCATs to better serve more students across Tennessee

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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.

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