As the training administrator at Western Washington Sheet Metal Local 66, Jeff Reinhardt has seen many apprentices come and go. Over the years, he realized a common thread among many of those who chose to stay — a seven-year gap.

This gap is the time between when a student graduates high school and when they finally join the trades. After graduation, many try college and realize sitting behind a desk isn’t what they want, so they drift from job to job for about three years until they land on the trades.

Reinhardt, like other unionized sheet metal training directors and coordinators across the country, wanted to find those candidates before the seven-year gap. Those who fall into the gap don’t typically have a tie to the trades — no relatives or friends to refer them.

Pre-apprentice and Apprentice Readiness Programs, or ARPs, have been quietly filling this niche for years, allowing potential apprentices to become familiar with some basics of apprentice work before they apply to the apprenticeship program of their choice. They learn to read a tape measure, the etiquette of a jobsite and the physical endurance it takes to work in construction. These are things that can surprise apprentices if they’ve never had experience.

While pre-apprenticeships and ARPs take many forms, Reinhardt chose to create his own. 

“It’s a way for us to find apprentices, but it’s also a way for the youth to figure out what they want to do with their lives,” he said. “In my mind, people go to college and change their majors half way through. They don’t know what that looks like and they’re investing tons of money into it.”

Western Washington’s Sheet Metal Summer Pre-Apprenticeship began in 2019 and accepts 15 to 20 students who are set to begin their senior year of high school and have been referred by their school’s shop teacher. For five days a week over four weeks, students go through the first year and a half of the curriculum. At the end, the top five performers receive direct entry into the apprenticeship.

“We’ve had a handful get into the top five, go back and finish their senior year, and when they graduated, they had a job sitting here waiting for them,” Reinhardt said.

Over the last five summers, 30 to 35 apprentices have joined the program after participating, and this summer the first batch of those first members of the Sheet Metal Summer Pre-Apprenticeship became journeypersons.

“We sent them out to the contractors, and after the first three weeks, they called and said, ‘If you have any more of those high school kids, I’ll take them,’” Reinhardt said. “You’re taking 18-, 19-year-old kids, who you introduced to the trades, working construction, and they’re loving them out there.”

In addition to this internal ARP, Local 66 also uses Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Employment for Women (ANEW) as well as SMART Heroes and the Heavy Metal Summer Experience to recruit apprentices who have already been introduced to the trade.

“All it takes is the right one with the right opportunity, and they excel in it,” he said. “They’ll be accepted with open arms because they have the right attitude.”

Across the country in Brewster, New York, Mike Keon, training coordinator for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation (SMART) workers Local 38, uses an external ARP, BUILDnBEYOND Hudson Valley, to bring in apprentices. Operated by the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA) Local 17, this ARP introduces pre-apprentices to multiple building trades, helping them choose where to apply for their apprenticeship.

Because applicants are aware of what it means to work in the building trades, they aren’t surprised when they step onto a jobsite or into a fabrication shop. Letting new apprentices know what to expect keeps them in the trade, Keon said.

“You’re not going to retain every single person you recruit in. Sometimes, some people are going to decide this isn’t for them. I think people who go through an ARP at least know what they’re getting themselves into. They know what to expect,” Keon said. “It’s a bonus. They look at it as a career, not a job.”

In Rockford, Illinois, Gary Glidden, training coordinator for SMART Local 219, incorporates sponsored pre-apprenticeships.

At his local, apprentices enter the program one of three ways: through unionization efforts, after applying directly or as a sponsored pre-apprentice, which Glidden describes as a “three-month job interview.”

To become a sponsored pre-apprentice, a training center-approved applicant can sign up and go to work for a contractor for a minimum of three months. At that time, the contractor can offer to sponsor them into the apprenticeship program as a direct-entry applicant and hire them as an apprentice.

This program allows contractors to have a direct say on the apprentices they sponsor, who they hire and the journeypersons running their shops tomorrow. In the end, not only do they get to choose an apprentice, they get someone they already know.

Pre-apprentices do a lot of grunt work — sweeping floors, making deliveries, driving trucks — but it’s a good ground to prove your worth, Glidden said.

“They get a good dose of what a sheet metal worker is in those three months,” he added. “Pre-apprenticeship so often leads to entry into our program that this opportunity is rarely turned down. About 40% of our apprentices work as a pre-apprentice in some role before becoming an apprentice.”

In 2017, a military outreach ARP was formed at Western Washington Sheet Metal, and two years later it was expanded to SMART Local 9 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. SMART Heroes — created by SMART; the International Training Institute (ITI), the education arm of SMART; and the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association (SMACNA) — provides free sheet metal industry training to recent veterans and active-duty U.S. military members who plan to enter the civilian life within the year. In order to graduate, participants complete a seven-week course, equivalent to their first-year sheet metal apprentice training. Upon discharge from service, these graduates may choose to enter any of the 150 SMART apprenticeship programs in the United States and be provided direct entry and advanced placement as a second-year sheet metal apprentice.

To date, the program has graduated more than 600 graduates and has a 60% retention rate.

John Jackson, training coordinator from SMART Local 28 in New York, currently has two apprentices from the SMART Heroes program, but it’s not the only ARP he utilizes. For 2025, he has 166 direct-entry applicants from external ARPs and he plans to retain more than 80% of them.

Other ARPs in use at Local 28 include Nontraditional Employment for Women, a nonprofit organization; Construction Trade Education, which recruits from New York vocational high schools; and Edward J. Malloy Initiative for Construction Skills, a nonprofit organization working with the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.

“For a program struggling to get apprentices, or to increase the amount of apprentices, these are great ways to prop up the apprenticeship,” Jackson said. “They’re ready to go on the job. They know what they’re getting into. They know where to start at an entry level, and you can build on that.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of sheet metal workers is expected to grow 2% between 2023 and 2033, despite approximately 11,500 openings projected each year, on average, over the decade. Most of these openings are to replace those retiring from the workforce.

ARPs and pre-apprenticeship programs are different in every city, every state, but they can help fill vacancies with employees who are ready, skilled and in it for the long haul. Getting out into the community — getting to know teachers and guidance counselors, the people in the community who run these pre-apprentice organizations — seems to be the common thread in finding successful programs and making them work.

“For me, it was getting to know all the high school shop teachers. I sit on a bunch of the advisory boards for the CTE [career and technical education] programs, and I do presentations in the shop classes,” Reinhardt said. “We invite the classes to do hands-on tours of the training centers. We build interest in the trade and what we do.”

In New York, Jackson is experiencing a validating shift at career fairs: “Guidance counselors are physically brining students to us, saying ‘These are the people you need to speak to, to better your life.’ That’s nice. We’re starting to see that shift.”