Chris Ray, Apprenticeship Supervisor at Stihl, on Making Apprenticeship Simpler

Intro

Hello and welcome to another Making Apprenticeship Simpler interview podcast! In today's episode, we have a special guest, Chris Ray from Stihl Incorporated. Chris brings a wealth of experience and insights from his diverse background in the apprenticeship space.

During the interview, Patrick Cushing, our host, dives deep into the world of apprenticeships with Chris. They discuss the key aspects of making apprenticeship programs simpler and more effective. Chris emphasizes the importance of thorough planning and understanding the scope of what it takes to create a successful apprenticeship program.

Chris also shares valuable lessons he has learned from working with numerous companies and apprentices across various occupations. He stresses the significance of integrating apprenticeship programs into an organization's overall structure and the crucial role of support from leadership and supervisors.

Throughout the episode, Chris provides practical advice on setting realistic expectations, assigning the right people to run the program, and considering HR objectives when implementing an apprenticeship program.

So, join us as we explore the ins and outs of apprenticeship programs with Chris Ray. You won't want to miss his insightful tips and strategies for making your apprenticeship journey a success!

Highlights

1. Chris Ray's background and experience in apprenticeship

- Worked for a group sponsor in an education setting

- Collaborated with nearly 100 companies and close to 1000 apprentices

- Transitioned into a consulting role

- Currently running the apprenticeship program at Stihl Incorporated

2. Making apprenticeship simpler

- Recognizing that apprenticeship is not simple

- Planning and educating oneself upfront

- Understanding the scope and requirements of an apprenticeship program

3. Common pitfalls in the current apprenticeship system

- Overemphasis on registration process

- Treating registration as the end goal rather than the starting point

- Lack of understanding of the support functions and coordination required

4. Integrating apprenticeship into the organization

- Considering HR objectives and other factors that touch the occupation

- Assigning appropriate personnel to run the apprenticeship program

- Ensuring support from various departments (HR, production, leadership, supervisors)

5. Key considerations for planning an apprenticeship program

- Setting realistic expectations

- Communicating and tracking the program's progress

- Identifying success metrics and tools for tracking

- Aligning the program with career paths and promotional structures

6. Benefits of proper planning

- Positive return on investment

- Avoiding costly mistakes and frustrations

- Addressing workforce challenges effectively

7. Essential components of an apprenticeship program plan

- Understanding registration as a necessary but not sufficient step

- Ensuring leadership buy-in and alignment

- Integrating the program throughout the organization

- Involving supervisors and tangential staff

- Adapting HR practices (job descriptions, performance evaluations)

- Tracking progress and making necessary adjustments

Transcript

Patrick Cushing:

Hey, everybody, this is Patrick Cushing from work hands. And today we have Chris Wray here who's going to speak a little bit about his experience. Chris, thanks for joining us. Can you give us some background on your apprentice experience and what brings you here today?

Chris Ray:

Sure. Thanks, Patrick. I appreciate it. I'm Chris Wray. I'm currently employed at Steel Incorporated in Virginia beach, running the apprenticeship program here, actually in the process of rebuilding it. My experience is fairly diverse in the apprenticeship space. I worked for a number of years for a group sponsor in an education setting, and in that context, worked with nearly 100 different companies and close to 1000 apprentices across multiple occupations. And that really built a foundation for me to gain an understanding of some things that worked well, some things that didn't, which ultimately led to my transition into a consulting role to help some people with those same things that work and pitfalls to avoid mindset, and how to actually construct a program within your own walls.

Chris Ray:

And finally landed here and wanted to put that concept to the test at a very significant employer. And given the fact I'd worked with a lot of manufacturers, this opportunity was near and dear to my heart. And so I landed, and now I'm putting all those lessons in place as I rebuild the steel apprenticeship program.

Patrick Cushing:

Fantastic. It's a treat here, right. I often will speak to somebody who has one side of that experience at the sort of education side, some of the employer side. Part of why we're doing this is because so infrequently, do people even know what the other side deals with or what that's like? So, Chris, you can speak to many different sides of this. I'm going to ask you one question, but I'm sure you have a bit more to say about this than a few other people might. Our focus is how to make apprenticeship simpler. We're asking everybody we talk to from their perspective, audio apprenticeship simpler. So that's my one question for you as well, Chris.

Patrick Cushing:

Given what you've seen in the apprenticeship system, like nitty gritty details, high level, how do we make the apprenticeship system simpler?

Chris Ray:

Sure. And it might sound counterintuitive, because what I'm going to say is you can make your overall life simpler by recognizing that apprenticeship itself is not simple. It isn't just a box you check. It isn't simple training that you bring someone in and they train in your facility for 4 hours and they leave so understanding what the scope of things and understanding them upfront. So my charge to anyone considering apprenticeship is plan. Educate yourself, realize that things need put in place. Don't build this plane as you're flying it. A lot of planning up front will save you hours and hours and many dollars and much frustration down the road.

Chris Ray:

So the planning up front and educating yourself on what supports an apprenticeship. I've worked with, again, many companies and one of the, I think, failings, a bit of the current apprenticeship system is the focus on the registration. Not to say registration isn't important, but the process of registration. You know, registration is intended to outline the objectives of a program. It's fraught with all of the regulations and legalities requirements. There's a lot of paperwork. And so you know that it's not unimportant, but it isn't the goal. And I think because it's so often stressed by governmental agencies or certain individuals, at times people complete that registration process and okay, we're done.

Chris Ray:

We have a program. Thank God I reached the finish line. And it's not. It's the starting line. That's where everything begins. I've spoken to in a lot of context that one of the things to think about is you could do all the things, all the requirements to get your driver's license, go through all the process, understand the rules, lead the test. That doesn't make you a good driver. It doesn't mean you know much of anything about what's really going on on the road.

Chris Ray:

It certainly doesn't make you a professional race car driver. And I think the other context, and again, speaking with a lot of manufacturers, think about this in terms of manufacturing your workforce. You would never go into a product manufacturer and say, well, we want to build a new widget. We know the piece of equipment it takes to manufacture it, we know what the cost, we're going to buy it and we're going to start manufacturing that widget. That would never be anyone's mindset. You have so many other things that you would want in place prior to getting that piece of equipment delivered. You have a market analysis. You need to understand suppliers.

Chris Ray:

You need to understand how it fits with the rest of your organization. You need to have a marketing plan. None of those things are actually about manufacturing the widget, which is the registration part, an apprenticeship. They're all the things that make it happen and support it within an organization. So I think if people start to understand that mindset, that there's a lot of support functions and coordination functions, and I use the word a lot of integration, integrate apprenticeship into your organization. You know, there's HR objectives, there are, you know, depending on your occupation, whether that's production or in healthcare, that's nursing or whatever it might be. There are a lot of things that touch that occupation that still need to be considered with the apprenticeship program as part of that planning. I think the other caveat is understand what realistic expectations are for anyone who maybe gets nudged into apprenticeship.

Chris Ray:

Let's go do this and we'll help you. And again, whether that's at a state or federal level or whatever, it's easy to get pushed ahead of your schemes and you get out and all of a sudden you're trying to operate a program and you really didn't even consider all the things to put in place. So that's a key in order to accomplish that. Another thing that I've seen ruin many a program before it started was assigning someone. Okay, Chris Ray, you're in charge. Go run the apprenticeship program. Well, most companies don't employ someone like me who would maybe know how to do it. But even within, with all of my experiences, I come here to steal.

Chris Ray:

I can't do it myself. I have to have support within HR, within production, within the leadership team, the supervisors of the apprentices, they need to know what's going to be going on, what the time commitment is, what the monetary commitment is, and having that keen understanding of all of these things that can be impacted and considering, you know, how are we going to communicate, how are we going to track our program? Are we going to have a product like work hands? You know, how are we going to know if it's successful? You want to have all of that identified upfront. So it might sound like a lot, and because it's important, it maybe is a lot, but the results are infinitely more important and the return on investment is positive, so that that effort is rewarded. Doing it the other way and trying to build a plane as you fly it and learn lessons as you go is way more expensive, way more time consuming. So invest in all of that upfront, get a good plan in place. Think about all of the things that could come out of this. How does it stack up with other occupations? How are your career paths, your promotional structure? Think about all of those things. And it really isn't a huge amount of planning.

Chris Ray:

When you think about the struggles that everyone has with workforce today and the many, many headaches that come out of that, give yourself one small headache planning a good apprenticeship program and you can avoid ten headaches down the road.

Patrick Cushing:

Love it.

Chris Ray:

Love it. Yeah.

Patrick Cushing:

You know, the premise of these calls, obviously, is how to make it simpler. I had another person point out, like look, if theres a return on your investment, theres an investment. This does take some work. This does take some time. Right. And I love that youre emphasizing the plan, because oftentimes the plan is just get registered, but not the plan for actually creating great apprentices lead to great employees. Now, oftentimes at this point, I would ask, all right, so if you had a magic wand, would you just solve that? I think youve hit a lot of those points. But if I could just ask you to summarize, like, what are kind of the key parts of the plan? Maybe the parts that often get overlooked if you're like, just bullet point, like, hey, here are, like, the five things that every plan should consider as you get into apprenticeship.

Patrick Cushing:

What would they be?

Chris Ray:

Again, I'd start with, don't focus on registration as the finish line. Understand that that's the rules. It's how things get set up. There's paperwork. Put that in its own context. I'm not saying it's not important. I'm just saying it's a self contained, necessary evil of sorts. But it has to happen.

Chris Ray:

But it does define what you want the results of your program to look like, what the skills you're trying to accomplish. So there's an importance there. But don't think of that as the end. It's the beginning of running your program. It defines what you're going to try to accomplish. Secondly, I use this one a lot. It's another one that derails many a program, and it's that integration throughout the organization. So maybe there's two big pieces of that.

Chris Ray:

Everyone in a leadership position needs to be on board with how important this is. If it's getting poo pooed from anywhere on high, anyone beneath that is going to think, well, this isn't so important. So if that isn't fully aligned, you're in trouble. Maybe more commonplace that I've seen would be the people just tangential to the program. So if you have an apprentice and their journey worker, even if they happen to understand everything they need to know for apprenticeship, they invariably have a shift manager or a supervisor who's not directly involved. And if that person says, oh, no, we can't take time today to have you do your training. We're busy. Well, you're gonna be so busy that you're gonna work yourself out of business.

Chris Ray:

You've gotta bite the bullet. So having those things, I'd say a last one would be, which encompasses a lot of that. Consider your HR. How are your job descriptions written? How do you handle performance evaluation, and how are you tracking progress and success of the program at that level so you can understand along the way? Okay, we need to make a tweak here or a pivot there. Those would be key things to really think about entirely upfront.

Patrick Cushing:

Perfect. Perfect. Chris? I had high expectations. Certainly met them. To summarize, somebody's mention, making sure you have the end goal in mind. The goal is not registration. It's having great people on your team, making sure it's integrated throughout the organization, and particularly making sure your supervisors, your journey workers in HR are fully on board. So this is just a core competency of the organization, not something that's tacked on.

Patrick Cushing:

So fantastic stuff. Chris, thank you again for joining us, and we'll see you again next time.

Chris Ray:

Appreciate it. Patrick, thank you.