Have you ever met someone who went to school, acquired loads of book knowledge, but then had trouble performing in the real world?
Beth Ann Wright, Founder of opusomni, a company that seeks to translate book knowledge into “real life practical experience” has seen just that many times. That is exactly why opusomni’s unique apprenticeships and educational programs have caught the eye of the U.S. government as a innovative way to re-tool education and boost the economy.
There’s a problem: many good jobs remain vacant in today’s economy. About 30 million U.S. jobs pay an average of $55,000 per year and don’t require bachelor’s degree, yet many of these jobs are getting bypassed as young people opt for the college route without a clear career path in mind.
The Trump administration has consistently championed apprenticeships as a means to develop and enrich our nation’s workforce. Last summer, President Trump issued an executive order that expanded and promoted apprenticeships as “affordable pathways to secure, high-paying jobs.” Around the same time, he accepted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s seemingly pie-in-the-sky challenge of developing an apprenticeship program that could create 5 million jobs.
Wright’s opusomni is part of the solution, as it connects the dots between the U.S. Department of Labor and employers to expand the DOL’s Registered Apprenticeships program, offering a “turnkey,” free-market solution to scale this program across their companies and help workers train for lucrative jobs without even setting foot on a university campus.
Employers partner with opusomni and the DOL through an Employee Participation Agreement, and the DOL then covers the cost of the opusomni ecosystem’s Registered Apprenticeship services. Employers also may receive other state and local tax credits, further incentivizing their participation. Registered Apprentices earn $15 per hour and are eligible for a raise every quarter until they finish their program—not bad, considering the alternative is thousands of dollars in college debt.
“From day one, they start earning and learning,” Wright explained to Red Alert Politics.
As a Registered Sponsor of the program, opusomni serves as the “Intermediary Partner,” providing companies their Purple Forest app for apprentices to guide their on-the-job training and competency-based skills education. According to Wright, the app “curates the world’s best online, on-demand educational content” and “tailors the most relevant educational content” to each user.
Wright believes users will find the Purple Forest app incredibly intuitive.
“The system is so smart that learners don’t even need to know what they need to learn to get started,” Wright said. “They just fire up the Purple Forest App, click on ‘Set’ and start scrolling through the list as the system asks them, ‘What competency skill would you like to work on?’ The learners simply scroll through the list and quickly get an idea of what they need to learn.”
Wright noted that the system “snaps together personal, relevant, specific competency-based goals” based on “five factors known to drive human performance achievement.”
The opusomni platform could also be the ideal solution for employers looking to upskill and reskill their workers.
More than one in four adults surveyed by the Europe-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported a mismatch between their current skills and the qualifications demanded by their jobs. The World Economic Forum also estimates that approximately 35 percent of the skills demanded for jobs across industries will change by 2020.
By providing on-the-job, real world training, the Purple Forest app would eliminate the need to go “back to school” and allow current employees to become greater assets to their companies.
Opusomni’s first Registered Apprenticeship program, launching in May, will be geared towards entrepreneurs. Pending DOL approval, opusomni will expand their “ecosystem” to include clinical and translational research scientists, clinical research professionals and teachers, and eventually expand to IT, technical, and construction professions.
Millennials have suffered under the burden of overwhelming student debt, graduating with an average of $37,000 in student loans. More shocking is that at least a quarter of college graduates are overqualified for their jobs according to the Urban Institute. Other organizations estimate that the number is as high as 48 percent.
Apprenticeship programs, encouraged through innovative partnerships like this one, can help put an end to millennial misery by providing a launch pad for more lucrative careers.
