Amy Mitchum loves the way her daughter’s kindergarten classmates’ eyes light up when she tells them she works with robots.
The 38-year-old Volkswagen factory worker is a graduate of the automaker’s experimental apprenticeship program, modeled on the vocational training used to educate workers in Germany. In 2012 she left an unfulfilling career in real estate office management and enrolled in the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Volkswagen Academy’s three-year course.
She completed her training in August and now spends her workday overseeing an assembly line of spindly robots coating glossy paint onto the tempered-steel shells of what will ultimately become Passat sedans.
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People, Patta said, have misconceptions about Volkswagen’s factory floors. “They think it’s dirty, it’s dark, it’s loud, it’s crazy — it’s a completely wrong picture,” he said of the factory in Chattanooga. In reality, he added, the place is pristinely clean.
Apprenticeships could also make workers feel good about themselves. The sense of pride instilled in people paid to learn a trade boosts morale, says Robert Lerman, an American University economics professor who specializes in youth employment and family structure.
“These systems tend to convey a strong sense of occupational pride that too many of our middle-skilled positions don’t,” he told HuffPost. “They don’t have a strong sense that they’re part of a community of practice, and as a result, they don’t get sufficient respect or feel self-respect.”
