Jordan is paid to learn: forty hours a week on commercial job sites with a journeyman, and classroom instruction on Tuesday and Thursday nights. He is good with his hands, quick with a multimeter and slower with the textbook. He studies in the truck at lunch, from photos of the whiteboard, and he will not read a 30-page chapter when a 3-minute video exists.

• Pass each year's exam the first time
• Get assigned to the hospital job, where the interesting work is
• Be the journeyman who explains things well, in three years

• Formulas that make sense in class and vanish by the exam
• Code book sections written for lawyers, not electricians
• Studying after a ten-hour day on a ladder

• Seeing the thing wired, then reading why
• Short videos he can watch on his phone with the sound off
• Practice questions in the exam's exact format

• Journeyman pay at 27 and no student debt
• Working on the reservation's new clinic when it breaks ground
• His uncle, who told him the trade would take care of him

Illustrative composite. Drawn from published research on apprenticeship programs and trades education. Not a research persona: no apprentices were interviewed for this profile.