Electrical · JATC Migrated spring 2025

Halloran Electric stopped chasing signatures

180 apprentices across three trades, reconciled by one training director on Sunday afternoons. Twelve weeks after migration, approvals cleared in four days.

Program Halloran Electric

Apprentices 180 · 3 trades

Location JATC Local 5, PA

Plan JATC

Second-year apprentices on a Halloran service crew, Pittsburgh.

01 — Problem

One person was the system

Before

·21-day median from sheet to approval ·Wage steps audited once a quarter, by hand ·Three trades, three spreadsheet formats ·Classroom rosters in one inbox

Halloran ran a program most committees would envy — 180 apprentices, three trades, a wage schedule negotiated line by line, and foremen who took teaching seriously. What it did not have was a way to know, on any given Tuesday, whether a second-year was on track.

Hour sheets came in on paper, went into a folder, and got reconciled when Marcy Halloran had a free weekend. By the time a shortfall surfaced it was a dispute rather than a conversation, and wage steps were landing two or three months after the apprentice had earned them.

The program had also lost four first-years in eighteen months. None of them left over the work.

02 — Solution

Three weeks, starting at the hour sheet

We refused to touch classroom, evaluations, or reporting until weekly approvals were clearing in under seven days. That took two weeks. The rest of the migration took one more.

Sign-off moved to the truck Foremen approve a week's hours on a phone in under thirty seconds, with gloves on, before they leave the site. The sheet posts to the OJT ledger on signature rather than travelling through three inboxes.

Their wage schedule, encoded exactly Every threshold and step as the committee negotiated it — including the two trade-specific exceptions that had never fit a spreadsheet formula. Advancement now fires the day an apprentice crosses the line, with a human approval gate the committee asked to keep.

Shortfalls surface the same day A short week flags to the apprentice and their foreman the day the sheet clears, and clears itself once corrected. Marcy sees a review list, not a folder.

Reporting built on the same records Committee packets and state submissions generate from the ledger the program uses every week — so the annual filing stopped being a separate project.

03 — Result

Twelve months later

21 → 4 median days from hour sheet to approved

100% wage steps advanced in the month earned

1 first-year departure in the following year, down from four in eighteen months

1 afternoon to assemble the state filing, down from three weeks

I stopped chasing signatures. That's the whole review. My third-years advance the week they earn it now, and I get my Sundays back.

MH

Marcy Halloran Training Director, Halloran Electric · JATC Local 5

The number Marcy cares about is not on this page. It is that no apprentice at Halloran has advanced late since the migration — which is a claim the program can now prove from its own ledger rather than defend from memory.

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