Building California’s Apprenticeship Future: NextGen’s Work at the 2026 CEMETS Institute
Let’s Talk… Building California’s Apprenticeship Future: NextGen’s Work at the 2026 CEMETS Institute
How a second year representing California brought sharper focus, new partnerships, and a path toward stronger apprenticeship programs
November 13, 2026
In October 2026, I joined other state leaders from California and across the country in Indianapolis, Indiana for the U.S. Advanced CEMETS Institute (Institute). I returned to California with a sharper definition of the problems in the state’s apprenticeship system that need to be solved, a stronger relationship with my network of peers doing this work in other states, and a feeling of real momentum heading into our next California coalition convening in December.
The NextGen team is deeply grateful to the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation and CareerWise for co-hosting the Institute and to the CEMETS team at ETH Zürich for designing a program that challenged every state team to think more expansively about its work. We thank them for investing in the states working to build something new and for making NextGen's participation possible. I also want to thank my California teammates at CareerWise and LAUNCH Apprenticeship Network for leading our state's case.
It was incredibly energizing to share space with Institute participants from different states, different political perspectives, and different economic outlooks as we all worked to solve the same problem: how to build education and training pathways that lead young people to good careers.
What is CEMETS?
CEMETS is the Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems, based at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Switzerland is known for a vocational and professional education system where employers and educators share responsibility for preparing young people for careers, and where an apprenticeship is a respected pathway, not a fallback.
CEMETS helps states and countries learn from the Swiss apprenticeship model and adapt and refine it to their own set of conditions. Rather than just simply copying the Swiss system, participants draw on its core principle that industry should help lead the design of education and training in genuine partnership with schools and colleges and then pursue pathways that progress from that foundational framework.
The U.S. Advanced Institute is built for states already doing this work. Each state team brings a "case" and works through a problem-based learning process: present the case, hear analysis of the problem from their peers and the ETH team, collaboratively dig into its causes, and then build goals, targets, and an implementation plan. Much of the Institute's value comes from peer learning – a short conversation with a state that has already tested an idea can spare another state a year of trial and error. Several months ago, state teams started with a virtual workshop to develop the case for assessment and then spent the Institute presenting, getting feedback, and finally pitching their draft plans to a room that included national funders.
California's Progress
This was NextGen's second year representing California at the CEMETS Advanced Institute. We take this responsibility very seriously because we are attending on behalf of the communities that are trying to make the apprenticeship system work for those that can benefit from it the most. In California, this means: young people who don't see themselves in a "college or nothing" system, opportunity youth, justice-impacted individuals, and those in rural communities far from the state's job centers.
As a returning team, we were asked to test the assumptions behind last year's case rather than repeat it. California arrived with a long list of real challenges, including fragmented funding, unclear standards for youth apprenticeship, slow program registration, and intermediaries stretched thin. The workshops pushed us to identify the core problem underlying all of these issues.
Through that process, the California team developed a shared problem statement that will anchor our work through the coming year:
"The state lacks a permanent, industry-led structure for non-traditional apprenticeship programs with defined authority and sustainable funding to organize employers and drive apprenticeship at scale.”
Reaching an agreement on that statement is a meaningful step because it turns a list of good ideas into a plan. It clarifies which recommendations matter most, who owns them, and where funding should go first.
We also left Indianapolis with a much clearer picture of what California needs to answer next: who leads this work statewide, what level of capacity it will take to sustain this work, and how will we fund the work over the next three to five years.
What Comes Next
Coming out of Indianapolis, California's partners agreed on how we will coordinate next steps: organizing the work into clear workstreams, each with a lead organization, a named owner, and a way to measure progress so that every priority has someone accountable for moving it forward.
That work begins on Wednesday, December 2, 2026, when we reconvene a core coalition of California partners in Sacramento to:
- Turn our problem statement into broad goals and specific targets;
- Assign ownership for each workstream and map the capacity it will take to follow through;
- Identify state and philanthropic funding to sustain the work over the next three to five years; and
- Update the California Apprenticeship Ecosystem Blueprint our partners developed last December to reflect what we've learned and what's changed.
NextGen is grateful to everyone who has been part of this journey so far and we're excited for what December will bring. If your organization is working in the apprenticeship space in California and wants to connect and learn more about our work, please reach out at kami.peer@nextgenpolicy.org.
Thanks for reading,
