Authored by Stephanie Klein, Senior Director of Business Partnerships, CareerWise in Colorado

What happens when a world-renowned rehabilitation hospital decides to invest in teenagers with no healthcare experience? At Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado, the answer has been a quiet transformation — of their workforce, their culture, and their patients’ experience.

For several years, Craig Hospital has collaborated with CareerWise to provide high schoolers with authentic immersion into the world of rehabilitative therapies. By rotating through physical, occupational, recreation, and speech-language pathology departments, these apprentices witness the daily realities of clinical care well before declaring a college major. What began as a simple community-focused outreach has blossomed into a powerful blueprint for employers, demonstrating how to invite young talent into a world of professional possibilities they might otherwise never have discovered.

Why Therapy? Why Apprenticeship?

When Craig’s team first explored apprenticeship, the rotation through all rehabilitation therapies was deliberate. These roles are central to Craig’s inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation work — and yet they remain largely invisible to the public. Most people know about doctors, nurses, and social workers. Therapists, despite being essential to recovery, are an underexposed career pathway.

Apprenticeship offered Craig a way to change that. The goal was never purely about pipeline — it was about community exposure and career awareness first, with workforce development as a meaningful second. The result? A program that has evolved across three cohorts and delivered value in ways the team didn’t fully anticipate.

“We weren’t just building a pipeline. We were giving young people a window into a career most of them had never considered.”

The Benefits Nobody Predicted

Ask Craig’s team what the program has delivered, and they’ll talk about the apprentices — but they’ll also talk about the supervisors.

Supervising a 16- or 17-year-old with zero healthcare background is fundamentally different from onboarding a 22+-year-old staff member with a bachelor’s degree and post graduate work. It requires breaking tasks down to their most elemental parts. It demands patience, scaffolding, and the ability to teach workplace norms that more experienced employees already carry. For staff who are on the path to leadership but not yet there, supervising an apprentice has become a “sandbox” for focused development of those skills.

Therapists and nurses across the floor have reported a fresh energy that comes from having apprentices working alongside them. The supervisors grow. The floor is lifted. And something less tangible but equally real happens: it keeps the team connected to why they do this work.

There’s also been an unexpected benefit on the patient side. Craig’s model involves long lengths of stay — patients are there for extensive rehabilitation post injury, not a quick procedure. In that context, a teen apprentice brings a peer-adjacent presence that older clinicians can’t replicate. Patients and families have shown genuine curiosity about the apprentices — their goals, their schools, their futures — and that curiosity has become its own form of connection and rapport.

Building While Flying: The Real Story of Program Development

Craig’s program didn’t arrive fully formed. The team will be the first to tell you that cohort one was a “build while flying” experience — heavy on improvisation, light on infrastructure. Daily scheduling across multiple floors and coordination with high school calendars created early friction. Progress tracking was inconsistent. Program ownership felt diffuse, with too many hands and not enough clarity.

What Craig did well was learn. By the second cohort, they had upgraded supervisor supports — orientation playbooks, progression rubrics, teen-focused teaching tools. By the third, they were running a “rising seniors” pilot that acknowledged the reality of imminent college transitions and adjusted accordingly, including shortening the program from three years to two to better align with healthcare’s higher-education requirements.

Perhaps most importantly, they clarified ownership. Early on, many people felt involved in the apprentices’ experience — but no one was clearly in charge. Craig moved toward a defined core group with decision rights, inviting broader input while centralizing accountability. The result was a program that felt more intentional and more Craig.

“Be ready to pivot mid-cohort when the data and realities change. That’s not failure — that’s how you build something that lasts.”

What Craig Would Tell Other Healthcare Employers

After several cohorts and hard-won lessons, Craig’s advice to peer organizations is clear and practical:

Start with your intent. Are you building a pipeline or offering exposure? The answer shapes everything — program length, rotation design, how you measure success. There’s no wrong answer, but there is a wrong assumption: that the goal is self-evident. It isn’t.

Calibrate your expectations for who you’re working with. A 17-year-old is not a junior employee. They need explicit instruction in professional communication, workplace norms, and what it means to show up consistently. That’s not a deficit — it’s the design.

Invest in your supervisors, not just your apprentices. The people doing the daily coaching need tools, support, and recognition. A thank-you card and a box of cupcakes during National Apprenticeship Week matters more than you might think. So does a rubric that tells a supervisor exactly what “good” looks like at month three versus month twelve.

Plan for school complexity. Different districts, different calendars, different counselors — communication variability is a feature of working with high schoolers, not a bug. Build redundancy into your loops and assume nothing will arrive on time.

A Small Moment That Says a Lot

During National Apprenticeship Week, Lauren, a Program manager at Craig  delivered cupcakes and handwritten thank-you cards to Craig’s apprentices and their supervisors. A few days later, an apprentice followed up with a thoughtful thank-you text of her own.

It’s a small thing. But it’s also evidence of something the whole program is trying to build: a young person who knows how to show up, follow through, and say thank you. That’s not a soft skill. That’s a career foundation.