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Using the word 'intern' instead of 'apprentice' can make a substantial difference in your labor pool.
The second item of the team-building checklist found in the September 2006 column, "Just Say Yes," is: "Newly hired trainees are called and treated as interns rather than indentured apprentices." Wouldn't you like to have your employees bragging about that to their families, friends and acquaintances? That is called recruiting power!
Webster's dictionary defines apprentice as "one bound by indenture to serve another for a prescribed period with a view to learning an art or trade. An inexperienced person."
Does that sound inviting to any young man or woman with the ability and ambition to become a proud craftsman and move up to management positions? They certainly would not be proud enough to brag about it!
You could look a little further in that dictionary to the word intern, described as "an advanced student in a professional field gaining supervised practical experience."
It's easy to understand why simply changing a title would solve 90 percent of your skilled labor shortage. Naturally, the last 10 percent comes with treating those workers like interns rather than indentured apprentices.
Abolishing Indentured Servitude: Let's look at some of the negatives of intern vs. apprentice, along with feasible resolutions:
1. Most indentures are for a specific time, usually four or five years.
Resolution: Every human being is different in willingness and ability to learn, intelligence, inherited craftsman skills and previous construction experience. By assigning your intern to work with one craftsman who has been trained to coach and develop necessary skills that are documented in your database skills inventory, your superstars can reach journeyman status in less than one year.
You need to monitor the progress of the intern as well as the master craftsman/mentor to assure bragging results. You can relate this process to a high school football coach recognizing a player's potential and promoting a freshman to play with the varsity. That is the...