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“It’s been a blast.”
That’s how 18-year-old Lee County resident Mason Setzer describes his summer, which he spent pouring concrete, demolishing a strip mall, and learning the basics of the construction trade at Central Carolina Community College. He’s a preapprentice with Sanford Contractors.
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Sanford Contractor’s summer preapprentice program is very popular: They received more than 90 applications for just 14 spots. Setzer is one of the selected few. He spent nine weeks this summer getting paid around $14 an hour for his construction work — and learning the tricks of the trade.
Sanford Contractors also welcomed its first female preapprentice in the program’s four-year history this summer.
“When they called me to tell me [I got it], I wasn’t expecting it. I was just sitting by the river,” Setzer said. “I was excited. On the first day, I just jumped right in, did my class. And I just loved it. I’ve been staying busy. There’s no time to stand around.”
But for Setzer to choose construction so young, Sanford Contractors had to choose to create their preapprenticeship program. That decision wasn’t random.
The rising number of employers in apprenticeship and preapprenticeship programs — and the increased interest in them from young people — isn’t an organic trend. It’s the result of years of deliberate construction: federal programs and grants, state investment, philanthropic money, marketing, and careful oversight.
“There has been a push, going back 10 years, to try to expand apprenticeship programs,” Steven Allen, an economics professor at NC State University, explained. “The supply of apprenticeship programs, the funding, and the push from the government all helped drive growth quite a bit. This really seems to be one of the few areas where there is bipartisan support.”
For example, in North Carolina, many apprentices go to community college for free — meaning the state handles a good part of the apprentices’ training for the employer. Plus, ApprenticeshipNC takes care of the registration and compliance for employers, streamlining the process and reducing barriers to entry.
Now, in the state budget, passed this summer by the General Assembly a year late, lawmakers are requiring ApprenticeshipNC to study the feasibility of a state-funded incentive for employers who take on apprentices. A similar $12 million pilot program from 2021 saw enormous success and ends this year, according to Chris Harrington, director of ApprenticeshipNC.
The state budget also ups the state investment to $4.4 million yearly for ApprenticeshipNC, nearly tripling the existing state funding.
“This is enabling us to take some strategic steps to streamline and de-friction the system,” Harrington said, “and allows us to reposition federal grant dollars toward employer incentives.”
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Plus, private funders like Lowe’s Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies have funneled millions into apprenticeship programs in North Carolina.
That’s because it solves a major economic problem.
For a business to want to invest time and money into an apprenticeship program, they must face a workforce challenge, according to Harrington.
“If a business can hire the people they need that have the skills they want — the traditional transactional model — they’re going to do it,” Harrington said. “They’re only going to lean into registered apprenticeship when they have a problem their current or legacy approach doesn’t solve for.”
Those workforce problems are becoming more common, Harrington said. Getting people in the door with the skills and commitment required to do these jobs well is increasingly difficult. That problem is compounded by baby boomers retiring and birth rates dropping, a trend Harrington refers to as “the gray tsunami.”
Statistics show the extent of the problems. More than 60% of North Carolina employers report difficulty hiring, according to the North Carolina Department of Commerce. Last year, only 76 workers were available for every 100 open jobs in the state, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 2.1 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2030, a trend that could create economic losses of up to $1 trillion annually.
As Duncan Lundy, Setzer’s mentor at Sanford Contractors, put it: “We have a huge void to fill.”
Still, convincing businesses to invest in a young worker who has a lot to learn can be difficult. For Sanford Contractors, their program is a chance to fix a problem “before it becomes a crisis,” Lundy said.
The prospect of “building and developing your own people,” as Harrington puts it, is exciting — but it isn’t cheap.
“We’re asking them to get comfortable with some things that are uncomfortable,” Harrington said. “When the employer is making that investment [in an apprentice], we’re asking them to forecast a future need that could be three or four years [away]. We’re asking them to provide structured training, and we’re asking them to select a candidate that they believe will be successful.”
The discomfort, Harrington argues, pays off.
Roughly nine in 10 apprentices are still with their employer five years after finishing. Sanford Contractors is seeing it already: about 40% of its pre-apprentices have stayed on with the company in some capacity, a figure development director Zac West says exceeds his expectations. Setzer hopes to be one of them.
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“It’s well worth it on our end,” West said.
This story was originally published September 2, 2026 at 5:00 AM.