The future of workforce development will include financial navigation
SaverLife is bringing AI-powered, personalized financial navigation to apprenticeship programs — helping workers build financial health alongside their careers.
Workforce development and career advancement programs have long been important pathways to higher-paying jobs and greater economic mobility. Apprenticeships offer a particularly compelling model: workers can earn while they learn, gaining skills and experience without stepping away from the workforce. Those who complete a Registered Apprenticeship earn an average starting salary of $80,000.
But access to a higher-paying career is only part of the equation. A bigger paycheck can open the door to greater economic mobility, but wages alone don’t determine whether someone is able to build savings, weather an unexpected expense, reduce debt, or begin building wealth.
- The pathways into good jobs are changing. Student loan debt continues to weigh heavily on many SaverLife members, while AI is reshaping the skills and occupations that will define the future workforce.
- Interest in skilled trades is rising. According to The New York Times, enrollment in public two-year vocational and trade programs grew nearly 20% between 2020 and 2025, alongside growth in apprenticeships and private trade schools.
- Demand for skilled workers is growing. Jobs for the Future points to workforce gaps in the skilled trades, including an estimated shortage of 447,000 construction workers, as demand grows for workers to build and maintain infrastructure across areas like AI, advanced manufacturing, and energy.
As investment in apprenticeships and workforce development grows, we should also be thinking more expansively about what success looks like. A higher-paying job matters, but so does what happens once those earnings begin coming in.
Personalized financial navigation can help workers decide what they want those earnings to make possible and figure out what comes next—whether that’s building an emergency fund, paying down debt, improving their credit, or beginning to save for retirement. Workforce development programs provide an opportunity to provide that support as people enter new careers and their earnings begin to change.
And timing matters. Career transitions can also be important moments for establishing new financial habits. For apprentices, providing financial navigation as they enter a new career and begin earning more means support can be available before new spending patterns and financial routines are established—and at a moment when it is directly relevant to what is changing in their lives.
Bringing financial health into workforce development
That’s what SaverLife is setting out to do through our partnership with The BlackRock Foundation™. Beginning in September, nearly 75,000 apprentices nationwide will have access to a custom SaverLife experience through the electrical training ALLIANCE (etA), the national training partnership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) as part of BlackRock Future Builders.
As part of this effort, SaverLife has designed a customized financial health experience for participating apprentices focused on four areas: emergency savings; debt management and credit building; maximizing income and reducing expenses; and retirement savings.
What workers need from that support will vary. For one apprentice, the priority might be building an emergency cushion. For another, it could be paying down debt, repairing their credit, or figuring out what to do with a significant increase in earnings for the first time.
As an electrician at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Luke believes that financial stability and wealth-building involve not only having money but also managing it effectively.
“I am an electrician, and financial stability to me is not just having the money but also knowing how to manage things. At one point, I was just spending, and my money would be in the bank, then it wouldn’t be in the bank. It was costing me extra money paying these overdraft fees, and then also certain things getting kicked back because they weren’t getting paid, and still getting a fee on top of that. So it’s like a double whammy. Keeping track of my expenses was really important for me to start doing.”
Rather than providing every apprentice with the same financial information, SaverLife’s AI-powered Financial Navigator can provide personalized support that evolves as participants’ financial lives change.
Applying what we know about financial action
At SaverLife, where we support more than 800,000 members nationwide, we’ve learned that financial progress rarely follows the same path from one person to the next.
Our research has also shown us the importance of personalization. Through initiatives like our Credit Conundrum, we’ve seen that people are more likely to take action when the information reflects their individual circumstances and breaks complex financial decisions into manageable next steps.
Now, we’re bringing those lessons into a new setting: supporting workers as they move through apprenticeship programs and advance in their careers.
Until recently, providing individualized financial navigation to thousands of workers would have been difficult to do at scale. AI is changing that, making it possible to provide personalized support that can evolve as someone’s financial life changes.
Financial health can be part of workforce development, not something that comes later. If we are investing in helping people build careers and increase their earnings, we can also invest in helping them turn those opportunities into greater financial security over time.
As we learn alongside participating apprentices, we’ll continue exploring a bigger question: How can workforce development help people turn increased earnings into lasting financial health?
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