Q&A with First Internet Bank’s David Becker on apprenticeships as workforce training

First Internet Bank was an early adopter of apprenticeships despite CEO David Becker initially being a “naysayer.”

Becker was skeptical of apprenticeships until he saw firsthand the benefits of Switzerland’s robust, “gold standard” apprenticeship system while on an Indy Chamber Leadership Exchange trip to that country last year.

“Although we do have some great programs here in the state of Indiana for good scholastic students, regardless of background, to get almost a free ride at college, it’s just a tough, tough, tough nut to figure out,” he said. “[With the apprenticeship program], they can get real-world experience and do it while they’re still completing high school and make a little money at the same time.”

Becker decided to bring what he learned to his company stateside and started a high school apprenticeship program. Over the past year, First Internet Bank has hired a few student apprentices, he said, but the program will truly gain momentum when changes to the high school diploma take effect, beginning with the class of 2029 (current eighth-graders).

The state’s diploma overhaul will give high schoolers more flexibility in their schedules and career tracks. State education officials approved the plan Dec. 11, and the proposal awaits the attorney general’s final approval.

Becker is also a co-chair of the Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems Implementation Laboratory, or CEMETS iLab Indiana. The group is building its Indiana Apprenticeship Pathway to develop 50,000 high school apprenticeships by 2034. One of four initial occupation pathways includes banking.

IBJ talked with Becker about starting First Internet Bank’s apprenticeship program.

What’s the difference between an intern and an apprentice?

An internship is a very finite time, three to six months. A lot of it is summer vacation work, and you could come back the following summer. In an apprenticeship, you’re actually an employee for two to three years at the company. It’s a more permanent, longer schedule. They’ll go through a six-month training session. It could be on lending. It could be on back-office operation. It could be customer service. Front line. There will be four different modules that they’ll take over the two-year period. They have to pass the modules to keep staying in the program and move forward.

It truly is a job if they get here. One of the big issues in high schools today is truancy. … Here, as an employee, if they don’t do what they’re supposed to, and they will sign a little agreement upfront between the parents and the student that this really is a job and you have to be here, … they get fired, and then they go back into high school as a regular student again.

Banking is an industry where you wouldn’t expect apprenticeships to be offered. What advice do you have for similar 9-to-5 office-job industries for starting their own apprenticeship programs?

I think the biggest issue is literally on the business side of things. It’s kind of an unwritten policy or a policy that companies have put up that they can’t bond or they can’t insure somebody under the age of 18. That’s really not the case even in the banking world. We just have to tell the bonding company we’re going to have [younger] employees. They do like them to be at least 16, because [if] you get under 16, there’s some child labor laws that come into effect.

The play is just understanding that there aren’t any real insurance issues and bonding issues or things of that nature that prohibit you from having somebody under the age of 18 working for you.

What about concerns over the performance of high-schoolers?

These are really sharp, sharp students, particularly in today’s world, where, if you take a look at the office work at the bank, 75%-80% of what you do through the course of the day is on a computer. The students in high school today, that’s natural for them. … Understand that these are real people looking for real opportunities. They can learn. You get a lot of stereotypes about teenagers and what they can or can’t do, and the reality of it is, some of our best employees are some of the youngest folks that work for us. They’re dedicated, they’re interested, they want to learn.

People that might even have some issues in high school, [school] doesn’t make sense to them. They’re not the best student in the classroom. When they get into the real world application and understand that math enables you to create financial statements, read a balance sheet, understand an income and expense statement, and you get the practical application of what the textbook is trying to teach you, it just kind of clicks for them.

How do you figure out what duties and tasks to assign to apprentices and make sure that it’s at the right level?

The trade association itself, the Indiana Bankers Association and the Financial Services Academy, they’ll help. They’ll determine the curriculum, along with folks at Ivy Tech [Community College] and at the high school level, and they will actually produce that for us. Each individual bank in the state of Indiana won’t have to figure that out on their own. It’ll be from a state level down, and it’ll also have testing and certification at the end, so they can move to the next quadrant and move up through the program. … They have a lot of curriculum, and they’re the ones that are working on that, along with the new high school guidelines to make sure it’s age-appropriate as well as content-appropriate. … We’re not starting with a clean slate and having to develop all that ourselves.

The success of an apprenticeship or internship program is often based on the employees students work with. How do you make sure a program is mutually beneficial both for your company and the student?

When we have three solid days a week, four solid days a week of time, we can really put together content, assign [the apprentices] tasks that are, again, age-appropriate knowledge that they can do and really make them a part of the team. One of the keys to our success will be the number of interns we’ve worked with over the years. It’s a little shorter program, but we already have mentors within the company that really love working with the young people and training them on the industry.

It’s a commitment. Although somebody else is putting all the curriculum together, we have to deliver it. We have to oversee it. And each of the apprentices will have a person within the company that is their mentor and tied to them to make sure we’re all moving at the right pace, and things are moving along well for both sides.

What about small companies that aren’t sure if they can afford it or have the bandwidth? What advice would you give to people who are in that situation?

Quite honestly, a lot of the smaller banks in the state of Indiana are really excited about this program because they don’t have the tools today along the educational lines. They have the staff, they have the opportunities, but they don’t have the academic skill sets where, in the apprenticeship program, the materials will be produced.

They have the same issue we have here in Fishers, Indiana, that they just can’t attract the local high school students to stay in town and go to work for the bank. If they can catch them while they’re in high school and develop that skill set and the relationship in the formative years, then hopefully post-graduation, they’ll stay with them and continue to work at the bank. The demand for good employees is statewide, and it’s a statewide problem. … There really haven’t been any colleges here in the state offering a true banking degree for many, many years. We’re all kind of feeling the pain.

A lot of times with the smaller communities, the school corporations are extremely excited to get their students engaged in the working community. It really becomes a win for all sides: for the family, for the schools, for the employer, and for the state of Indiana.

What does your return on investment look like for having apprenticeships?

Where we have openings, we have demand for the talent today. It’s not like we’re making up jobs to help them out. They’re actually going to be true employees that we will make a return on. I look at it as just an offset of other costs. If I hire people today, I’m going to placement agencies and different services to help me find employees that charge a huge upfront fee, supposedly to edit and find proper employees and do some matchmaking for us. But at the end of the day, it’s very expensive, and I’d rather take somebody young, bring them in, train them on the way we do business and the way we work. Sometimes, when you get an older, experienced employee, you have to untrain some bad habits from the prior employer.

If I get somebody out of high school or out of college that has a business degree or a finance degree, they really still don’t understand banking. I’m starting at zero with them and having to go through this team training play. I get a person through high school, and when they hit the door, versus a college graduate coming through the door, even though they have a higher degree, the student that’s come out of the high school program is going to know a lot more about my day-to-day operations than the college person.

First year, it’s a break-even because you do have startup costs. You need to get them on board. You have to figure out transportation issues, etc. Their learning curve, they will work and they will produce product for you, but that second and third year is where you really make great return. You’ll hopefully get a lifelong employee out of it. It’s an investment in the future, and it’s one I think we truly have to make.•

—Cate Charron