iFTI Full Article Summer 2026
Skill, Purpose, and the Measure of a Craft: What Technology Reveals About Who Training Is Really For
In the last Journal, I wrote about the tools that have influenced our trades over the generations, from rollers and airless spray rigs to articulating glass manipulators, automatic taping tools, and the AI and robotics systems beginning to appear on job sites and in training centers today. I argued that technology is not the issue. What matters is how it is used, and who it is used for. That question, ‘who is education for?’, is one I have been spending a lot of time thinking about lately. The deeper I get into the philosophies of thought leaders like John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the more I am convinced that the technology question and the training question are really the same question asked from two different points of view. And the answer matters enormously to every member, every contractor, and every affiliate in the IUPAT family.
When a new tool arrives on a job site, there are essentially two ways it can be introduced. It can be an instrument of productivity; something that increases output per man-hour, reduces labor costs, and improves the contractor’s bottom line. Or it can be a craft instrument; something that extends or amplifies what the worker is capable of, reduces physical strain, improves precision, and adds to the worker’s professional value and long-term employability. In practice, most tools do both. But which purpose governs how they are deployed, how workers are trained on them, and what is measured afterward, that is a choice. And it is not a neutral one.
The same logic applies to apprenticeship training itself. In the early twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen made an observation about universities that I believe directly applies to Registered Apprenticeship Training today. He argued that educational institutions are vulnerable to a kind of quiet capture, not a hostile takeover, but by the slow drift of what gets measured and rewarded. When business metrics replace educational judgment as the governing logic, the training institution may still look the same from the outside, but the internal purpose has shifted. The language of learning persists, but the institution is no longer asking what the worker needs to become. It is asking what the contractor needs to produce (Veblen, 2015).
Veblen did not oppose skilled work. He valued what he called the “instinct of workmanship”, the desire to do excellent work because the work itself demands excellence. What he opposed was skilled work subordinated entirely to commercial logic, a pecuniary interest. A craftsperson governed by quality standards and a worker governed purely by productivity metrics are not the same thing, even when they are standing at the same job site.
Max Weber’s idea of the protestant work ethic clarifies this point even more. Weber describes that work is not simply economic necessity, but a disciplined calling, or moral vocation through which character is formed and demonstrated (Weber, 2002). In that sense, apprenticeship has always carried a meaning deeper than just preparing workers for the jobsite. At its basic core, apprenticeship trains people to perform tasks, but in its best form, it develops workers who understand their craft as a methodical practice, governed by standards of quality, responsibility, excellence, and professional identity.
Veblen’s argument further points out this distinction. The ethic of workmanship and the ethic of productivity are related but not the same thing. A worker may be disciplined, and efficient while still being shaped primarily by external commercial demands. In contrast, the craftsperson is formed by the internal standards of the trade itself. The risk to our programs is that they may preserve the language of the 1937 National Apprenticeship Act’s educational purpose while slowly trading that formative mission for a narrower production logic. When this happens, apprenticeship risks becoming less a system of craftworker education and more a labor-supply mechanism dressed up in educational language.
The problem with this is one of utility. Of course, contractor needs matter, and apprenticeship programs need to remain responsive to the shifting demands of the labor market. But apprenticeship can not be judged by productivity alone. Its purpose is not simply to move a person more quickly into useful work. It also to teaches judgment, safety, responsibility, true craftsmanship and pride in the trade. It is where a worker learns not only how to perform a task, but how to understand the standards of the craft and his or her place within it. For us, it is inculcates them with the values that we as union brothers and sisters stand for. If this is all subordinated entirely to production metrics, it may become more efficient in one narrow sense while becoming less educational in the larger one. It may produce workers faster, but never succeed in producing true craftworkers. Apprenticeship is not just technical training. It is vocational and civic formation. When governed only by contractor productivity needs, it becomes little more than labor-market utility. Where Weber helps us understand how work came to be understood as a disciplined vocation, Veblen helps explain how that vocation can be corrupted when the internal standards of workmanship are displaced by external standards of commercial productivity.
John Dewey, a contemporary of both Veblen and Weber, pushed the critique in a different direction. He argued that the great unresolved question in American education was whether vocational training would be organized to serve the worker or merely to produce a more efficient instrument for the industrial system. Narrow job training, in his view, could actually be anti-educational, not because it was practical, but because it was only practical. It adapted the worker to the existing order without developing the judgment, understanding, or agency that would allow the worker to shape that order (Dewey, 2018).
Dewey’s vision for vocational education was more demanding than what most people imagine when they hear the term. He would have wanted apprentices to understand not just how to do the work, but why the work matters; he wanted them to understand its social meaning, its economic context, its history, and its future. He would have wanted workers who understood labor standards, safety regulations, industry economics, and their own collective bargaining rights, not because that knowledge made them more productive for a contractor on day one, but because it made them capable of full participation in a democratic society and a durable professional community. That is a very different graduate than one optimized for productivity only.
Yet this is where I think we are today. We spend so much time talking about creating productive workers through pre-apprenticeship programs, boot camps, just-in-time training, and worker-readiness programs, but we often do so through the lens of the contractor’s pecuniary interests, and sometimes we forget the actual worker in the process. Don’t misunderstand my point: training isn’t just about the worker, and we have to find balance in a system that serves all parties. But we cannot let the worker’s interests get lost in the shuffle.
This is all not just theoretical. American history, during it’s founding, offers some useful insight. Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy, proposed in 1749, was built on a more civic and practical premise than the inherited classical college model. Franklin argued that education should prepare young people to serve the commonwealth, commerce, and the practical needs of society, not exclusively to reproduce the manners of a learned elite. Older educational traditions separated liberal learning from vocational labor, treating the former as the proper education of free citizens and the latter as training for those who worked under others. Franklin didn’t simply reject liberal education. Instead, he expanded its scope to include English, history, natural philosophy, agriculture, commerce, and mechanics. It was a relatively anti-aristocratic argument from a man who had risen to become a member of the colonial elite. Franklin believed education should include both the liberal and practical arts. The academy was innovative and purposeful, not because it rejected liberal education, but because it widened the meaning of what counted as intellectually serious (Franklin, 1749).
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Within a generation, the academy had gravitated toward the classical curriculum it was created to challenge. No decision was made to revert to the classical model. But survival pressure, the need for prestige, legitimacy, and institutional standing in a competitive environment slowly pushed it in that direction. The founding purpose did not disappear overnight. It was quietly displaced, subject by subject, priority by priority, by the logic of what the surrounding culture appreciated and rewarded. Does this sound familiar?
The same pattern can be seen in the denominational colleges of early America. Founded by religious communities that wanted to educate their own ministers, shape civic leaders, and reinforce their values. But over time, those colleges faced pressure to attract more students and satisfy broader public expectations. They were in competition for students, money, and legitimacy. Some adapted without losing themselves. Others kept the name, the buildings, and the language of mission while becoming something quite different. In doing so, they became less distinct. They survived as institutions, but survival came at a cost. Whether their original purpose survived is a different question.
I have witnessed this same thing play out in apprenticeship. I have been part of this system for more than twenty years now, and I don’t believe our programs are immune to this same kind of drift. Training programs founded by workers, for workers, with a genuine commitment to developing the whole craftsperson, including technical skill, safety knowledge, labor history, jurisdictional awareness, and professional identity, can still be reshaped by what they are asked to measure. Completion rates matter. Retention matters. Employer satisfaction matters. So does the ability of an apprentice to contribute productively on the job. These are not the wrong things to measure. But when they become the only things we measure, they begin to define the program’s purpose. One former LMCI trustee often said, “What gets measured gets done.” He was right. But that only raises the more important question: what should we be measuring?
I want to be careful here, because the comparison to Franklin’s academy and the denominational colleges is not a perfect one. Those institutions drifted from an original purpose. The deeper I have gotten into the actual founding history of our own training apparatus, going all the way back to the founding of IUPAT in 1887, the more I have come to believe that the employer-service function was not something that crept in over time. It was part of the design from the start, a pragmatic choice made by people who needed the institution to survive long enough, to become stable enough, to make the meaningful changes in the world that it would grow into. That does not make the risk I am describing any less real. It just means the fix is not nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. It is a deliberate choice about what we build next, now that the iFTI is finally stable enough to make it. That history deserves its own treatment, and I intend to give it one in a future piece.
We spend a lot of time discussing curriculum and standards, thinking about what an apprentice needs to know. We also talk, at every level, about the limited time we have with them. The U.S. Department of Labor standard is 144 hours of related instruction per year (minimum), and while many of our programs exceed that, none of us feel like we have enough time, because we instinctively know that it is about more than just skills training. There is constant pressure to choose between whole-person education and productivity-oriented training. I experienced this tension personally in a recent discussion with several training directors about including the newly developed COR 1056 course. I have been advocating that it be included as part of the labor history requirement within our standards. Some of my colleagues pushed back. One of them said, in effect, “We don’t have time for that. We only have them for a limited number of hours. We need to teach them how to be productive on day one.”
That statement deserves much more attention than it received in the moment. Are we educating workers in order to empower them, or are we simply sharpening tools for the job? The answer determines whether apprenticeship remains a system of craftworker formation or just becomes a way to meet labor demand faster. Workforce development means different things to different people. What does it mean to you? Is our current system meeting the needs of the worker or the system?
And this is exactly where the technology conversations comes back in. Artificial intelligence, digital modeling, robotic tools, and augmented reality are already entering our training centers and job sites. They are genuinely powerful tools. And they carry the same potential that every tool has carried before them: they can be used to extend the worker’s capability and augment their skill, or they can be used to simplify tasks to the point where the worker becomes interchangeable; a monitor of automated processes rather than a skilled craftsperson. The choice between those two paths is not made by the technology. It is made by the people who decide how it is deployed and what it is measured against. As I said in the last journal, workers must have a voice in how it is deployed.
If the governing question is how do we use this tool to reduce labor costs or increase contractor profitability, the technology will shape training accordingly. Tasks will be subdivided, simplified, and optimized for the narrowest possible deployment. The trade will be ‘splintered’ to use the term we used on the ACA to explain this phenomenon. Workers will be trained for the process, not for the craft. The short-term efficiency gains may be real. But the long-term costs to worker development, to craft quality, to workforce resilience, and ultimately to the contractor who depends on a skilled and reliable workforce, will be equally real. We risk the elimination of true knowledge and the educational pipeline for workers. We risk the future ability to adapt to novel situations if we don’t continue to build the knowledge and skills pipeline necessary to reason rather than just predict outcomes and follow algorithms.
If the governing question is how do we use this tool to make our members more capable, more valuable, and safer on the jobsite, the result looks quite different. Training would be designed around the worker’s full development, not just productivity. The technology would be used to amplify skill rather than replace it. The journeyman who graduates from that program is not cheaper on day one, but much more valuable. Over the course of a career, that worker delivers more, stays in the trade longer, reduces costly errors, and carries the kind of craft identity that makes a union label mean something. This truly benefits the system as a whole, the worker, the union, the industry, and yes, the contractor.
I want to be direct and clear about something, because I think this argument may be misunderstood. This is not a call to prioritize worker development at the expense of productivity. It is an argument that those interests are more aligned than the short-term logic of the current system would suggest. Veblen’s critique was not that business interests are illegitimate. It was much more nuanced. When business logic alone governs what we today call workforce development, it undermines the very thing that made the training institution valuable in the first place. An apprenticeship program that produces technically capable, professional, civic-minded craftspeople is a more valuable partner to a contractor than one that churns out warm bodies who are only proficient in one narrow aspect of the trade. The difference shows up in leadership development, long-term retention, and quality of work that justifies the union premium, as well as the long-term health of the craft. If we had been more forward-looking over the past decades, the current skills pipeline would not be at risk; we would not be constantly talking about a worker shortage or a skills gap. If we don’t look forward from here, we risk the gap narrowing in the short term but becoming very wide in the not-too-distant future. Dewey put it plainly: the question is not whether education can be practical. It can, and it must be. The question is whether the practical education we provide develops the intelligence and judgment of the worker, or merely adapts the worker to a system designed around someone else’s pecuniary interests (Dewey, 2018). Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters to contractors as much as it matters to our members.
The early American debates about higher education were not just arguments over curriculum. They were debates about what kind of country was being built, and who education was for. Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison disagreed on many things, but they shared the view that the purpose of education was not simply to produce useful workers for the existing economy. It was to develop people who could participate in, critique, and improve the society where they live and work. Does this sound familiar?
That premise is worth defending in our training programs today, not because it is idealistic, but because it is practical in the deepest sense. Workers who understand their trade, its history, its standards, its social meaning, and their own role in shaping it are the people who sustain a craft throughout generations. They are the ones who become foremen, instructors, business agents, and the next generation of leaders in the IUPAT. They are the ones who become contractors, owners, superintendents, inspectors, and industry thought leaders.
The technology that will be deployed on the jobsite and in the boardroom in the very near future will reflect our values or it will reveal the absence of them. That is not a warning, but an invitation. We need to shape this future together. But shaping it requires that we remain clear about what we are trying to build, and who we are building it for. Think back to the 2024 convention. The question I put to that room was essentially the same one the founders were asking: who are we, and who do we want to become? The next leaders of the IUPAT, our industry, and this continent are in our apprenticeship programs right now. How are we shaping them?
References
Dewey, J. (2018). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education (P. H. Hinchey, Ed.). Myers Education Press. (Original work published 1916)
Franklin, B. (1749). Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pensilvania. University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center. https://archives.upenn.edu/digitized-resources/docs-pubs/franklin-proposals/
Veblen, T. (2015). The higher learning in America: A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men. Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1918)
Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (P. Baehr & G. C. Wells, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1905)
