On January 17, 2024, the National Governors Association Children & Families team hosted the monthly Human Services Policy Advisors Institute on supporting the ECE workforce through early childhood apprenticeships. 
Challenges persist within the child care sector as it struggles to regain jobs lost during the pandemic-induced recession: As of September 2023, the child care sector was still down about 39,400 workers compared with February 2020 levels. Additionally, when adjusting for inflation, wages between 2015 and 2022 increased by only $1.70 for child care workers and $0.10 for preschool teachers (CAP 2023), which only exacerbates challenges of attracting a qualified workforce. To address this challenge, states are leveraging early childhood apprenticeship models as a lever for increasing and supporting the workforce.  States have leveraged flexible federal COVID relief dollars and other federal and state investments to adopt and implement these models to support a skilled and credentialed workforce. This month’s Human Services Policy Advisors Institute explored state models for supporting, developing, and executing early childhood apprenticeships. (author abstract)