If AI Eats the Entry-Level Job, Where Do Young People Learn to Work? (Ryan Craig, Achieve Partners)
“The public should not be subsidizing colleges whose students lack relevant, paid, in-field work experience.”
For generations, the entry-level job was how young people learned to work.
Employers hired people who were not especially useful yet. Young workers made the spreadsheet, took the notes, built the deck, cleaned the data, sat in on meetings, and absorbed the tacit knowledge of professional life. The work was often tedious, badly paid, and invisible. It also taught people how to become competent.
Now AI is starting to eat that layer of the labor market.
Ryan Craig thinks higher education has not yet absorbed the consequence. College can still teach communication, critical thinking, and disciplinary knowledge. But employers increasingly want candidates who can contribute on day one, while AI strips away the work that used to make day-one competence possible.
That is the trap at the center of this conversation: everyone wants to hire someone with three years of experience, and almost no one wants to provide those three years.
Ryan has spent years arguing that the American education-to-work system has an experience problem. He is the author of Apprentice Nation and runs Achieve Partners, which recently closed a $450 million workforce fund to build apprenticeship models inside companies facing talent shortages and AI-driven labor market disruption.
His wager is that early work experience can no longer be left to luck. For decades, the U.S. has treated the bridge from school to work as something students mostly figure out through family networks, unpaid internships, campus job boards, and the occasional helpful alum. Ryan wants that bridge built deliberately, with intermediary organizations that find the work, employ the learner, train them through the messy early months, and make it easier for employers to take a chance on someone who is not yet productive.
And Ryan’s policy prescription is unusually concrete: pay employers to hire and train apprentices, following the countries that have scaled apprenticeship far faster than the U.S.; require colleges receiving federal student aid to provide relevant, paid, in-field work experience; and build a market of intermediaries that can make the whole thing operational.
Ryan’s view is that higher education remains critically important. But college without meaningful work experience may become a much worse bet, especially for students who cannot afford to guess wrong.
Ryan has some of the best earned insight on work-based learning in postsecondary education of anyone I know. He has the policy view, the market view, and the operator’s scar tissue. I hope you find his orientation as useful as I did.
-Allison
On Higher Education’s Current Moment, Plus Advice for Today’s High School Grads
ALLISON: What do people systemically misunderstand about higher education’s current moment?
RYAN: We need to expand our view of what a college education looks like. It needs to encompass classroom-based learning as well as project-based learning, and particularly work-based learning.
Classroom-based learning did the job for the economy of the 20th and early 21st centuries, and it’s still great at delivering the cognitive skills employers want. But it’s not going to do the job on its own anymore. The skills employers are seeking — and having a harder time finding — are more readily gained through project-based and work-based learning.
ALLISON: Why has classroom-based learning been well-suited for the last few decades, but isn’t going to be so for the next few decades? Put a fine point on it for us.
RYAN: It used to be enough for college graduates to demonstrate durable cognitive skills like communication and critical thinking, paired with a focused level of expertise in a subject matter area. But for at least the last decade, we’ve been naming a digital skills gap that the current system is not addressing. These digital skills — for example, Salesforce, Workday, cybersecurity — are easier to learn by doing than they are in a classroom.
This experience gap was growing before AI entered the picture. But now that employers are expecting entry-level employees to leverage AI to complete grunt work, new workers are expected to do higher value work from day one. That’s harder to do without prior work experience. As such, AI is turning the experience gap into a chasm. Students who graduate without relevant in-field and paid work experiences won’t be employable, and they will be invisible in the hiring process.
ALLISON: What career advice would you give to today’s 20-year-old?
RYAN: There are three ways to ensure strong ROI on your college investment.
First, attend a highly selective institution; their graduates tend to have excellent outcomes across programs of study.
Second, consider a STEM or health sciences program. Computer science may now be in question, but broadly speaking, the STEM suite is still generating strong ROI.
Third, go to a school with formalized, paid work-based learning. If it doesn’t have a co-op, ask what they can do beyond the internships listed at career services.
If you aren’t going to check any of these boxes, and you aren’t from a wealthy family, college may not deliver the ROI you’re expecting.
Colleges and universities do as good a job as they’ve ever done at equipping young people with cognitive and durable skills. The problem is that’s not enough in this economy.
On How Policy Could Actually Scale Apprenticeship in the US
ALLISON: Do you think the labor market will rebuild junior roles around AI, or will the first rung of the career ladder vanish permanently?
RYAN: It will be a permanent shift unless we make rapid policy changes. Policy and the dollars that flow from it could create an ecosystem of intermediaries that set up the lower rungs we need and run them for the benefit of job seekers and employers alike. That’s what we’ve learned from our work in apprenticeship.
ALLISON: Could you quickly define how you use the term intermediary in this context?
RYAN: Absolutely. An intermediary is any entity—for profit, nonprofit or public—that does some or all of the work that an employer would need to do in order to engage with an apprentice or an intern. They serve in the employer’s stead and do some or all of the heavy lifting: the most effective ones set up and run the program, serve as the employer of record, and deliver the training.
It’s a huge ask for your average employer to stand a scaled apprenticeship or internship program, and that’s one big reason we have shortages. Hiring, paying, and managing unproductive workers is anathema to them. The intermediary steps in to fill this gap.
At Achieve, we’ve demonstrated that intermediaries can work in private markets — particularly in sectors where the talent gap is large enough that trained apprentices can command a bill rate that covers what it costs to get them there. If we shift meaningful public funding into work-based learning – meaningful on the scale of what we invest in classroom-based postsecondary education – that aperture will dramatically widen to encompass much more of the economy. We will see intermediaries emerge in sectors where apprenticeships couldn’t possibly exist today, simply because no employer would pay a solar panel installation apprentice $64–$75 an hour before they gain some measure of productivity.
In my book Apprentice Nation, I show that countries with thriving apprenticeship programs don’t have employers who are more farsighted or benevolent about hiring and paying unproductive workers. Instead, they have intermediaries either required by law or highly incentivized by the government to run these programs — for apprentices and employers alike, the true beneficiaries of that talent. The same is true across the full spectrum of work-based learning. It’s why other countries have scaled work-based learning eight to fifteen times further than we have, per capita.
ALLISON: If you could write an executive memo today that went to the president’s desk, giving the administration a set of instructions for funding solutions for entry level preparedness, what would you write?
RYAN: Every company — for-profit, nonprofit, or public agency — that hires and trains an apprentice or intern should be compensated on a tiered scale depending on sector. In the UK, defending on the profession, companies receive £20,000 per apprentice, others £10,000. Apprenticeships and internships would need to be compensated differently: apprenticeships lead to permanent hires, whereas internships are by definition time-limited while the student-employee pursues a program of study. For its many faults, this administration may be the first to truly understand this; they’ve allocated $3–$6k per apprentice. That may suffice for internships, but it won’t move the needle on apprenticeships. We need billions in additional funding for both.
Second, the Department of Education should require that institutions receiving federal student aid have a paid, in-field work-based learning requirement. FSA would set the rule and enforce it, or accreditors could play that role. Institutions unwilling or unable to comply would forgo Title IV participation. The public should not be subsidizing colleges and universities where students lack relevant, paid, in-field work experience.
That will be a sea change — few institutions are capable of setting this up themselves. We have maybe ten with full-fledged co-op programs across most programs of study today, which pales in comparison to other developed countries.
ALLISON: At some level, it’s hard to imagine a galvanized work-based learning movement for higher education right now, because the supply-demand power dynamics have shifted away from talent and toward employers. When I worked on co-ops and apprenticeships earlier this decade, there was a strong employer appetite because employers were investing heavily in early career talent. But that seems to be shifting with AI. It’s still a priority for applied jobs in healthcare and other sectors with entrenched talent shortages, but I’m not sure that holds across the knowledge economy, into which higher ed funnels most its graduates.
RYAN: Sure. The difference lies in how the intermediary operates. In the model I’m suggesting, intermediaries aren’t just providing didactic training and management; they are the employer of record. Our companies typically serve as employers of record for two years, until a candidate becomes productive — at which point our companies are meeting the demand for the experienced, productive professionals that employers are seeking.
ALLISON: What are good examples?
RYAN: We recently sold a company called Optimum Healthcare IT, which implemented, configured, and integrated Epic — the predominant electronic medical record software — in hospitals. Epic certification is notoriously difficult to acquire. It’s a privately held company based in Madison, Wisconsin, and unless you’d worked at Epic in Madison or been seconded to a hospital project through PwC or Deloitte that included Epic training, certification was out of reach. The result is a shortage of tens of thousands of Epic-certified analysts, admins, and developers needed to keep this core patient records system functioning.
Optimum launched the first Epic apprenticeship program, Optimum CareerPath, producing hundreds of certified analysts deployed to hospitals and healthcare systems. Apprentices remain Optimum employees for at least two years before transitioning to the hospital or health system — arriving with substantial hands-on experience and genuine productivity. Measured against bill rate, they were a real bargain.
We have another company, RiseNow, which runs the first apprenticeship program in procurement and supply chain technology. One client is a large state university system centralizing procurement onto a single platform. RiseNow managed that project, leveraging RiseTalent apprentices to onboard all vendors onto the new system. We expect the university will bring those apprentices on as full-time platform admins going forward.
On How Work-Based Learning Needs to Play Out in High School, In College
ALLISON: Let’s suppose your vision is wildly successful; we’ve authored the legislation that creates a mandatory work-based learning requirement within universities, we fund employers to take on entry level talent, and we have the resources to do the associated skilling. What does a learner’s journey look like in that future?
RYAN: First, if work-based learning is truly scaled and adopted, more earn-and-learn pathways out of high school will follow. That will require a cultural shift in how we approach the high school curriculum, which has historically been aligned with a college track and biased against CTE courses. Establishing this third pathway—really many pathways into hundreds of jobs with clear career paths available to high school graduates—would level the playing field for American students. We need to break the college-or-Chipotle dilemma we’ve created for high school grads.
Second, for those who do go to college, a significant share of credit hours should be devoted to project-based and work-based learning. That will require a reorganization of how universities are structured, and some institutions will do it better than others, as we’ve already seen with the shift to online learning. But higher education has a growing recognition of the need to change, and I see genuine openness to this kind of pedagogical innovation.
And then finally, at any entry point into the workforce, whether you’re graduating from high school, community college, a four-year degree, or graduate or professional school, you’re still probably going to need some kind of apprenticeship pathway. With AI in the picture, we can’t expect that employers are going to continue to hire and pay workers who are unlikely to be productive out of the gate in the way that they did a generation ago.
On Lessons Learned in Scaling Apprenticeships and Intermediaries
ALLISON: What lessons have you learned about scaling intermediaries and apprenticeships across your portfolio? What learnings do we need to take forward into the next decade?
RYAN: At the macro level, we need to reorient workforce development around jobs and employers. Unless there is a job and a willing employer on the other end of the initiative, outcomes are likely to be poor. If workforce development continues to revolve around classrooms, with the job as an ancillary concern, then we are simply training and praying. We need to put the employer first, and engineer our workforce dev systems around that — starting in high school, and certainly at the post-secondary level.
ALLISON: So the lesson is this: we could theoretically imagine a train-and-pray system that worked if we were good at distilling the competencies required for employment and teaching to them. But we’ve shown time and again that we don’t get it right. Therefore, we need the accountability mechanism of an employer describing the work they want and need.
RYAN: That’s right. The solution is more involved than creating an advisory board of ten employers who articulate competencies to an institution, which interprets them into a curriculum, then recruits and enrolls students into it. You need employer engagement in training itself. A case in point: a community college in the DC/Northern VA area made an effort about eighteen months ago to develop the talent needed for clear demand in semiconductor manufacturing. The college got input from some of those companies, put together a curriculum, and ran the first cohort of 30-odd students. Six months after graduation, just one was employed in that work.
That’s where intermediaries can play such an impactful role.
ALLISON: The data is undeniably quite bad here. And so I appreciate that you are pushing us to flip to a new model, where employers themselves functionally create the accountability loop in the system. There are some really interesting attempts to improve the train-and-pray model, I think because it is just so challenging to get employers into the loop — we’ve spoken with folks who are scaling internships through simulated environments, for example.
RYAN: Yes, right; I’m thinking of companies like Podium who is heading in the direction of simulated work experience.
But for me, real work-based learning needs to be producing work that is of value to and consumed by a real employer. Simulated work experiences where there is no end-consumer is probably a bridge to nowhere. It’s better than nothing, but it also doesn’t qualify you to do a real internship with a real employer on the other end. For simulated internships/apprenticeships to work at all, there need to be stepping stones between the simulated experience and a real job. No one is going to hire you because you completed a simulated internship.
One Small Signal
ALLISON: What’s one small signal in the world right now to which we should be paying more attention?
RYAN: I do think co-ops will become universal or near-universal. MIT, for example, just announced a committee to study whether they should compete with Northeastern’s co-op program. If MIT feels they need to do it, pretty much every college should feel that way.
The number of schools capable of doing that themselves is numbered; everyone else will need an intermediary, in the same way that 25 years ago colleges needed help going online, and we saw the emergence of the OPM market.
We’re about to see a whole new market of internship service providers that help institutions expand and manage work-based learning. It’s necessary, because employers won’t maintain co-op relationships with a thousand different colleges and universities. Intermediaries will aggregate the supply of learners and the demand for work-based learning, serve as the employer of record to reduce friction, and use AI-based platforms for onboarding, matching, and managing work. We’ve just partnered with what we think is the first one, Alchemy.
We’ll see dozens of these intermediaries in the next few years — and that will be the foundation upon which work-based learning finally scales into the college experience writ large.
Terrific read.