Hands-on approach: Chattanooga emerging as leading apprenticeship hub

Jocelyn Rocha was volunteering at the Creative Discovery Museum when she heard about a mentorship program and competition for high school students to help design building projects in Chattanooga.

The Ooltewah high school student had developed an interest in interior design and architecture and decided to join the ACE (architecture, construction and engineering) mentor program to learn more from those in the industry. In her junior year, she was part of a six-person team of students that designed a mock multi-use building similar to the Partnerships in Industry and Education (PIE) innovation center in Cleveland, Tennessee and in her senior year Rocha was part of a similar team that put together a plan to develop a lot on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga.

“This gave me some great hands-on experience in a career that I want to pursue,” Rocha says. “It really helped confirm my interest in interior architecture and it was great to be able to work with other students and mentors who work in the industry using real-life design tools like SketchUp.”

Rocha’s teams not only won top honors in both 2022 and 2023 for their proposed building designs; Rocha also walked away with a $6,000 ACE scholarship, which she plans to use to help pursue a degree at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga after she completes a two-year associate degree at Chattanooga State Community College.

Rocha was among 10 local students to share in $30,000 of scholarships last year after participating in the local ACE mentor program, which began 15 years ago as one of a growing number of local apprenticeship programs established to help train more students for in-demand jobs.

The rising cost of traditional four-year degrees, which were long believed to be the pathway to success for young Americans, are yielding ground to the more traditional educational approach of apprenticeships and learning on the job. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, total college enrollment has dropped by nearly 1.5 million students, or by about 7.4%. But apprenticeships are growing, nearly doubling for men in the past decade, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Apprenticeship hub

Apprenticeship programs are proving especially popular in Chattanooga, which was named last year as one of only a handful of Apprenticeship Innovation Districts across America supported with federal grants and the consulting firm BuildWithin. Chattanooga’s Apprenticeship Works, the smallest community in the country to become a hub in the program, qualified for a $1.8 million federal grant last year and is also being supported by a variety of businesses, local governments, schools, nonprofits, foundations and community partners.

“What is happening here in Chattanooga is very special,” Michelle Rhee, a former Washington, D.C., chancellor who co-founded BuildWithin, said during a visit last year to the Construction Career Center. “What we have built together in Chattanooga over the past year is really setting the example to the rest of the world.”

Hamilton County’s Future Ready Institutes, which pair local employers and high schools, and the Chattanooga Construction Center built two years ago to to train both high school students and adults, offer both training and real-life work experiences for a variety of jobs for both vocational and college-bound students.

“With these apprenticeship programs, we truly believe that if we can train our students well in a career that supplies a thriving wage and that can be life-changing for many families in our community,” Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Justin Robertson said last year when the Apprenticeship Works program was launched.

Walton Robinson, who was hired last year to head the new Hamilton County-Chattanooga Apprenticeship Hub, says Apprenticeship Works also helps businesses train their workers while on the job, backed up with proven on-line instruction courses.

“We have a variety of programs that have been pre-approved by the Department of Labor which can be used by a local business partner in a kind of turnkey operation,” says Robinson. “We think we’ve lowered the barriers as much as we think they can be lowered for businesses that are interested in starting apprenticeship programs.”

Josh Davis, the founder of the technology, design and marketing company Human Powered, is using the Apprenticeship Works program to help develop the graphic design skills of one of his marketing employees, Meghan Lindstrom. Based on the initial success of the digital on-line training program and his own mentorship, Davis said he is eager to use the apprenticeship program to help recruit or train at least two other workers.

“In our business, the employees we need to have the hard skills in their craft to perform at a very high level and that’s exactly what we are getting out of our partnership with Apprenticeship Works,” Davis says.”We’re able to take an employee with a background as a marketing generalist and get her really dialed in on graphic design and I don’t have to be the one to do that training.”

Davis says the software programs provided by Apprenticeship Works allow the apprentice workers to get online instruction and complete work modules to learn new skills and then apply that knowledge in a real-life work situation for the employer.

“It’s a really easy way to measure results and it has worked out great for us,” he says.

ACE mentor program

While many of the apprenticeship programs being added in Chattanooga are for existing workers, the ACE mentor program targets high school juniors and seniors to introduce them to careers in architecture, construction, engineering and related areas of the building design and construction industry.

Students gather at local high schools and at EMJ Construction, the Creative Discovery Museum and TVA offices once a week during the fall to meet with industry mentors to design hypothetical projects, tour local construction sites, and visit architectural, engineering and construction offices. The teams often learn how to use advanced computerized tools, such as AutoCAD, Revit and SketchUp, while special exercises and activities illustrate the industry’s demand for young people skilled in math, physics, economics, art and other disciplines.

“Like many businesses, we need talented people to staff our operations and we want students to be able to find out and experience what they might be getting into in our industry,” says Jeff Rayburn, an engineer with Compass Commissioning and Design who s president of the Chattanooga chapter of ACE and has served on the board of the mentorship program since its creation in 2009. “We try to give kids an idea of what really happens in designing and building a project and that experience can be really valuable in supplementing what they may learn in a classroom. You really don’t understand what they work is like until you get out into the industry.”

Linda Allen, an architect at Unum, helped bring the ACE national mentor program to Chattanooga in 2009 to help broaden the appeal and diversity of the predominantly male engineering and architecture fields.

“Today, we proudly celebrate the program’s enduring success, inspiring a new generation of diverse leaders in architecture, engineering, and construction who will make meaningful contributions and give back to our community,” Allen says.

Caitlin Moffit, a civil engineer in Chattanooga, competed with her twin sister on an ACE high school team in Nashville in the 1970s. Although her sister beat her out for the college scholarship, Moffit said the ACE program and her work on designing mock building projects with industry mentors still provided her with valuable training, contacts and experience to pursue her degree in civil engineering at Tennessee Tech University and later join the Tennessee Valley Authority.

“That initial experience of being able to dream something and then plan how to build it was so cool,” Caitlin recalls.”ACE provides a great chance for students to learn from professionals in the industry and see how projects are designed and built.”

The TVA engineer, who has served on the local ACE mentor program board for the past decade, is eager to provide that experience to other high school students considering careers in design, building and engineering.

Moffit and other mentors are helping a student team prepare a mock building concept and design for a new Ocoee Whitewater Center to replace the facility that was built for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta but burned down in a 2022 fire. A main visitor’s center building will be the focus of the ACE project by the students who will present their proposals during an ACE competition in February.

“This is not only a great community service and a lot of fun for our mentors, but this is also important to us at TVA as we try to develop a diverse workforce and partner with the communities we are in to develop and attract the best talent we can,” says Rozh Mohamadameen, a manager of engineering and architecture at TVA.

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* Short-term career programs offer win for students and employers