PHOENIX — Sheldon Hatch recently graduated from DP Electric’s apprenticeship program, meaning he now holds national credentials to work as a project engineer. Employees, like him, can work for the company and get paid while attending their in-house school for free.
“You come out of it debt free and you’re making money the whole time,” Hatch said. “So it’s really nice being an adult and not having that extra stress of having bills to pay.”
Apprenticeship programs are becoming a popular alternative to college, with the number of people choosing trade schools over a traditional bachelor’s degree up 64% within the last decade, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Jennifer Mellor with the Greater Phoenix Chamber says all those graduates shouldn’t have trouble finding a job.
“There’s a need for roughly 250,000 craft professionals here in the Valley from now until December 2024 and just with electricians, we need about 17,000,” she said.
That’s because of a construction boom in Arizona from electric vehicle companies, semi-conductor plants and big names like Intel and LG coming to the Valley within the past few years.
Mellor says if there aren’t enough people to build those facilities, that could bring all that growth to a halt.
“We’ve had projects that have slowed down or in some cases, they’ve been halted,” Mellor said. “We’ve seen a lot of that backlog freeing up over the last six months or so but if we don’t have the workforce to build the facilities then that just has this compounding effect on our economy.”
So that’s where schools and companies like DP Electric come in.
“This is the new age revolution of the traditional trade school,” said Director of Field Operations at DP Electric Mike Sulcer. “We’re in this big tech boom over the next 20 years and so in order to build out the infrastructure it’s going to require a lot of skilled tradesmen.”
Sulcer says there are spots available for the spring semester and enrollment starts in December.
