The IBEW-NECA joint apprenticeship program is one of the greatest achievements of the American labor movement.

Every year, tens of thousands of working men and women walk through the doors of one of our 270 training centers and learn a trade that changes their life trajectory.

When they top out, that union-made journeyman ticket frees them from the chains of low wages and uncertainty from nonunion contractors and hiring agencies.

No one built this for us. No one can tell us how to run it or force us to teach anything except what IBEW local leadership and our signatory partners in NECA choose.

No one knows better how to unleash the potential of working people.

And no one knows more about how crucial our apprenticeship program is to our economy.

The demand for electrical workers is higher than ever. And only the IBEW and NECA have the know-how and resources to meet that demand with the best-trained energy workers in the world.

This month's cover story is about how we are safeguarding that legacy by tirelessly innovating. With our partners at NECA and the leadership of the Electrical Training Alliance, we have been rolling out critical improvements to the apprenticeship to keep it the crown jewel of worker-run education in North America.

We are making it bigger, better, more efficient, more useful, more effective and more personalized.

The amount of on-the-job training hours hasn't changed, but nearly everything else has.

I encourage you to read the article about how we have revolutionized our apprenticeship to meet the demands of our times.

Critically, the leadership of the Electrical Training Alliance recognized years ago that the IBEW would need hundreds of thousands of new journeymen linemen and wiremen and began making plans to meet the moment when it came.

Today, we are reaping the benefits of their work. Using the computer-based educational tools the ETA created, every local in the country can grow.

And we urge every program to fully embrace the flexibility these powerful tools give us to expand and accelerate the production of the journeymen we desperately need.

Everyone should shift to computer-mediated learning as quickly and completely as possible.

Everyone should keep the lights on at their training facility as long and as frequently as possible: days, nights and weekends.

Everyone should use in-person instruction time primarily for hands-on training.

Everyone should consider shifting to rolling admissions so we have exactly the right number of apprentices at all times.

Organizing may be the largest source of the new members we need for the future.

But the apprenticeship will be the foundation.

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