Several decades of studies evaluating youth employment programs funded through the nation's second-chance system have demonstrated the shortcomings of programs that concentrate on work experience alone and try to reverse years of inadequate education, discrimination, and alienation in a few weeks or months. The School-to-Work Opportunities Act identifies a comprehensive, multiyear, youth-focused, community operated, state-organized, and federally supported model linking school-based, work-based, and "connecting" activities to a range of postsecondary education and training opportunities. The model and the school-to-work programs based on it contain important lessons on providing high quality on-the-job learning that can benefit planners/providers of Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) programs. JTPA programs are facing the challenges posed by moving from funding of separate programs, which allows some coordination, to a specific emphasis on being part of a unified, multiyear youth development system serving a variety needs. At the level of JTPA program operations, work-based learning should include the following elements: integrated of academic and occupational training; broad, transferrable skills development; adolescent development focus; preparation of adult participants; program management; and linkage into a comprehensive youth development system. (Appended are lists of 10 elements of quality work-based learning and 9 technical and social competencies identified as learning objectives for youth apprenticeship.) (MN)