Understanding Registered Apprenticeship Program Standards: Solar Technician Example

Casey Coghlan understands all the ins and outs of Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs). Before she worked as a Colorado Apprenticeship Consultant, Casey worked on the employer side of apprenticeship equation where she built a RAP for a construction company. Through that experience, she learned firsthand how straightforward and beneficial structured workforce development programs, like RAPs, can be. 

In HeatSpring’s free course How to Start Your Registered Apprenticeship Program, Casey walks us through a work process schedule (also known as a standard) for the position of Solar Technician. Casey selected the most relevant apprenticeable occupation for the employer, in this case, Residential Wireman. She then modified the occupation title to Solar Technician and populated the work process schedule with tasks relevant to the company building their program. Tune in to the video or the transcript below to learn more. If you’re interested in downloading a copy of the Solar Technician Work Process Schedule, you can find it within the How to Start Your Registered Apprenticeship Program free course. 

What I want to do first is share with you what that would look like if I were to develop a registered apprenticeship program with a company. Janine [the previous presenter] was showing you what the Department of Labor standards would look like. And so this is just a different optical version of those standards. This is what the employer and I work with back and forth when we’re figuring out what occupations we want to place on their Department of Labor standards.

So within that, when we were talking  about apprenticeship-able positions/occupations, in this case, the one that we found is the residential wireman, that was spoken about.

And so the occupation title has been modified to solar technician. Always on your Department of Labor standards in the OJT [on-the-job training], which is what we’re looking at right now. Here is an example of what workplace safety could look like. Again, as noted before, this allows for the apprentice and for the mentor to sign off on the proficiency tasks.

So when companies are developing what this could look like, if you really do it with a lot of intention, you could create yourself a nice little checklist that could see the apprentice from beginning until the end, as well as some other competencies here. Take a look here, and again, this will be available for everyone to have a copy of [it is available for free in our How to Start Your Registered Apprenticeship Program course].

And so again, it’s how you’re going to divide it up. This company is doing interconnection, permitting, and bill of materials. However, we can tailor this training program so it makes sense for you and for your apprentice. 

As we talk about the support that exists for you all as businesses, I’m just one of many entities and we’ll talk a little bit more about that.