As part of the administration’s Workforce Development Week, President Trump is set to visit Waukesha County Technical College in southeast Wisconsin on Tuesday afternoon.
Key administration actors, including Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and Ivanka Trump, will join the president, touting their plans to facilitate apprenticeship programs aimed at closing the skills gap in the labor market.
“We’ll be launching a series of initiatives, call on Congress to pass various reforms expanding apprenticeships and raise awareness about the fact that there are important and very viable and respectable career paths outside of a traditional four-year college experience that should be considered and should be invested (in),” the president’s daughter explained in a statement, previewing the administration’s plans.
Those initiatives will likely include efforts to make it easier for organizations to certify apprenticeship programs. The administration sees a large part of the battle as a messaging problem, one they intend to fight over the next four years.
In Wisconsin, where the unemployment rate just fell to a 17-year low, Trump will have a captive audience. Waukesha County, the region served by WCTC, ranks atop Wisconsin’s 72 counties in terms of average annual wages. The trade and manufacturing sectors are Waukesha County’s two largest fields of employment, according to an economic profile published by the state in 2015. But they are also declining.
“Annual average employment in trade, transportation, and utilities, the county’s largest sector, declined primarily due to a decline in the wholesale trade subsector, along with declines in the retail trade and transportation and warehousing subsectors,” the report revealed. Construction jobs, on the other hand, grew by almost 8 percent in 2014. Notably, average wages for county residents employed in constructing and manufacturing topped $62,000, putting them only behind the financial activities and information sectors as industries with the highest annual pay.
In Waukesha County, where I grew up, white and blue collars mingle seamlessly for the most part. Successful business executives who work in Milwaukee settle into communities alongside workers from trade, manufacturing, and construction backgrounds. Several of the state’s top high schools fall within its borders.
Even while jobs in manufacturing and trade decline, so too has the number of young people trained to fill them. Employers in the region complain of a scarcity of qualified workers.
WCTC is an important local resource equipping county residents to fill those positions, many of which provide strong incomes.
According to the school’s 2016 Graduate Success report, 71 percent of 2015-2016 graduates were employed, 83 percent of which were employed in jobs related to their training. That marked a four percent increase from the 2013-2014 class.
Those numbers do not include data from WCTC’s apprenticeship program. Though the data sample from that program is small, only 11 of the program’s 42 graduates appears to have responded to the survey, average salaries all surpassed $50,000. The county’s average annual wage was $50,333 in 2014, according to the state’s 2015 profile. Of the more than 50 percent of Maintenance Mechanic/Millwright Apprentice graduates who responded to the survey, the average salary was $64,852.
In Waukesha County, there is both a need for the administration’s efforts and answers as to what those efforts should look like.
Trump won the county with 60 percent of the vote last November. Hillary Clinton barely earned one-third of ballots cast.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
