An October 29 Massachusetts apprenticeship award gives Reading Memorial High School $20,000 to develop health care and advanced manufacturing apprenticeships. The program is still being developed, which makes this an ideal moment for Reading educators and participating employers to decide what competence should look like.
One way to measure it is to give trainees a plausible but flawed instruction. A health care trainee might notice that an administrative handoff omits an important detail from approved records. A manufacturing trainee might see an AI-generated checklist that specifies the wrong component. Both must learn to verify the facts, document discrepancies and escalate the issue to a qualified supervisor.
The school’s pathway should pair classroom lessons with supervised scenarios and feedback from mentors who perform the work. Measure how reliably students recognize errors, explain their decisions and know when to ask for assistance.
Massachusetts’s broader October apprenticeship initiative emphasizes on-the-job training and earning while learning. As Reading builds its own program, employers should be invited to help design assignments that lead toward paid opportunities.
The most important outcome is a young worker prepared to question a polished instruction before an error reaches a patient, machine or customer.
Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, a behavioral scientist, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026) https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook