Vocations · Job Skills

Every hour on the job,
counted.

Enter what your apprenticeship requires, then log each day or week. The page adds up your hours by work process, shows your next raise and a finish date at your current pace, and prints a monthly record for your supervisor to sign.

Open the tracker What you get

$5one-time · every device you sign in on

Buy · $5

Included with the Caveat Academy pass and Whole-school licenses. Or get it in the Job search kit, $29 for 34 items.

The tracker

The page opens on a made-up example: an electrician apprentice 11 months into an 8,000-hour program. Look around, then choose Start my own.

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What you get

Vocations · Job Skills$5

What you finish with: A running record of your on-the-job and class hours against what your apprenticeship requires: totals by work process, your current wage step and the hours to the next one, a finish date at your current pace, and a printed monthly record with signature lines.
Who it is for: Registered apprentices in the building trades, manufacturing, health care, technology and other occupations; pre-apprentices and career and technical education students learning how an apprenticeship is counted; instructors who want a worked example to teach from.
Format: Browser tool with four parts: a progress view, an hours log, the program setup (required hours, work processes, wage schedule) and a monthly record. Prints a month for signing; downloads every entry as a spreadsheet (.csv) and a backup file you can import on another device.
Access: $5 one-time, yours on every device you sign in on; the tool opens once you are signed in with it. Included with the Caveat Academy pass and Whole-school licenses. Also in the Job search kit ($29) and the Vocations Suite pass ($99), and 1 more bundle. It runs in your web browser on a phone, tablet or computer. Everything you type stays in this browser and is saved there as you go; nothing is sent to Caveat.
Where it lives: The Job Skills space in Caveat Vocations.
Support: Questions, a correction or a request: team@caveatacademic.com.

How to use it

Look through the worked example, then choose Start my own.
On the Program tab, enter the hours your apprenticeship agreement requires, its work processes and its wage schedule. If you are starting partway through, add the hours already on record.
On the Log hours tab, add each day or week: the date, the work process, the hours and your supervisor’s initials.
Open Progress for your totals, the work processes that still need hours, your next raise and a finish date at your current pace.
Each month, print the record for a signature and compare it with your sponsor’s statement. Export a file now and then as a backup.

Open the tracker

How apprenticeship hours are counted

What the federal standards ask for, and what this page does with your numbers.

Two kinds of hours

A registered apprenticeship in the United States pairs paid work with classes. On-the-job learning is the supervised work itself. In a time-based program the term is counted in hours, and federal standards set the floor at 2,000. Some programs measure demonstrated skills instead, or a mix of hours and skills. Related instruction is the classroom side: the technical subjects behind the work. The standards recommend at least 144 hours of it for each year.

Work processes and wage steps

Program standards outline the work processes an apprentice is trained in and roughly how much time goes to each. The bars on the Progress tab show which ones still need hours, which is worth raising with a supervisor before a gap grows. Standards also call for a wage schedule that rises as skill is gained. Many programs write it as a percent of the journeyworker rate that steps up at set hour marks; enter yours and the page shows the step you are on and how far the next one is.

How the page does the arithmetic

Hours are kept in quarter hours, so totals are exact. A week runs Monday to Sunday. Pace is your average over the full weeks behind you, eight at most; before there is a full week in the log it uses the typical week you entered. Finish date = hours left ÷ pace. The class comparison takes 144 hours a year from your start date. Hours on record before you began the log count in every total and are left out of the pace.

Whose record counts

Your sponsor keeps the official progress records and decides which hours are credited. This page is your own copy: a way to see where you stand, to catch a missing week while everyone still remembers it, and to bring a clear monthly record to the person who signs for your hours. If your program measures skills instead of hours, the hour totals here are only part of the picture.

How it is checked

Before each release the calculator is run against the same rules written a second time, on 2,500 random programs and logs, and has to agree on every total, date and wage step.

What the tracker counts. In this made-up electrician program, pay rises in eight steps as hours on the job add up, and classes run beside the work at 144 hours a year. The marker is the example apprentice: 1,840 hours in, partway through the second pay period.

Sources

U.S. Department of Labor. Standards of apprenticeship, 29 CFR 29.5(b): the term of apprenticeship and the 2,000-hour floor for time-based programs (2), the outline of work processes (3), related instruction and the recommended 144 hours a year (4), the progressively increasing schedule of wages (5), review and progress records (6), credit for earlier experience (12) and records (23). 73 FR 64425, Oct. 29, 2008, as amended at 81 FR 92107, Dec. 19, 2016. Read at law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/29.5 on November 10, 2026.
U.S. Department of Labor. Definitions, 29 CFR 29.2: apprenticeship agreement, journeyworker, related instruction, sponsor and Registration Agency. Read at law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/29.2 on November 10, 2026.

The example program, with its work processes, wage percentages and pay rate, is made up to show how the page works; it is not any real program’s standard. Your apprenticeship agreement and your sponsor’s records decide which hours count. This page is a personal record, not an official one, and it is not legal advice. Support: team@caveatacademic.com.

Every hour on the job,counted.