ASU Digital Workforce Apprenticeship Partnership

ASU Digital Workforce Apprenticeship Partnership ASU Digital Workforce Apprenticeship Partnership The Arizona State University Digital Workforce Apprenticeship Partnership (ASU-DWAP) is a public-private partnership designed to create a bold, innovative and sustaining apprenticeship program to address the nations acute need for a skilled Information Technology (IT) workforce. The objective of this proposal is to close the technology skills gap in the labor market through a broad portfolio of high skill educational activities and paid apprenticeships. As stated in a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, More than 120 million workers in the worlds 12 larg-est economies may need to be retrained/re-skilled in the next 3 years as a result of intelligent/AI-enabled automation. To address this need, ASU-DWAP brings together employer partners (Chemonics International, Choice Hotels, Cognizant, IdLink, Institute for Supply Manage-ment, PetSmart, Raytheon, and SRP), Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act (WIOA) work-force development network (Arizona@Work), and industry associations (Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA), Arizona Technology Council and Pipeline AZ) to design and accelerate the adoption of apprenticeships in high skill areas that have traditionally not used apprenticeships. The geographical scope of the apprenticeship program addresses workforce needs of our employ-er partners primarily in Arizona with access options available nationally. ASU-DWAP is led by Arizona State University (ASU), the nations largest public university, named the most innovative school in the nation for five consecutive years by U. S. News and World Report. The key innovations of this collaborative private sector employers and industry organization apprenticeship program will be: (1) creation of four distinct, progressively higher skill pathways to train apprentices for highly sought after H-1 B occupations, (2) inclusion and modularization of an extensive portfolio of ASU digital courseware in Information Systems, Business Data Analytics and Cybersecurity as educational materials for the apprentices, (3) build-ing strong sustaining collaborations with employers, industry associations and workforce de-velopment organizations in Arizona to produce paid apprenticeships, and (4) development of new digital courseware in emerging and in-demand technologies such as cloud computing, internet of things (iOT) and deep learning.