Local Voices: Hagerstown should turn AI savings into apprenticeship time

Hagerstown has a workforce-development asset many communities spend years trying to build: employers, schools and training programs already meet around real pathways into work. The 2026 Washington County Career Expo drew nearly 150 employers and more than 1,000 jobseekers, and Washington County Public Schools describes youth apprenticeship as education, mentorship and on-the-job training.

That model matters even more as artificial intelligence changes entry-level work. The Stanford Digital Economy Lab’s updated analysis finds that employment among U.S. workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations is about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. The comparable shortfall was 15% in the July 2025 data vintage. Stanford finds the adjustment is showing up mainly through reduced hiring.

The practical response is not to freeze AI adoption. It is to redesign the first job.

When AI drafts a first pass, a junior employee should spend the saved time checking the answer, finding exceptions, comparing alternatives, interviewing a customer, testing assumptions and making a supervised recommendation. Experienced employees should receive explicit credit for coaching those tasks instead of being rewarded only for their own output.

Hagerstown employers can make this concrete with a mentor-hour rule: for every block of routine work AI removes from an entry-level role, reserve part of the gain for supervised practice that builds judgment. Track how quickly a new hire can independently handle an exception, explain a decision and catch an AI error.

Washington County already treats apprenticeship as a workforce strategy. The AI era calls for extending that logic from trades and formal programs into offices, health care, logistics, finance and professional services. The goal is simple: use automation to shorten the path to competence, not erase the path altogether.

Community submission by 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

All opinions and statements are made by the author, and do not reflect those of RFHC, our sponsors or clients.

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