Artificial intelligence is evolving so quickly that employers are still figuring out what skills they’ll need from their workers in even just the next few years. That creates a challenge for colleges trying to prepare students for jobs that may look very different by the time they graduate.
It also makes a compelling case for apprenticeships and longer internships, which allow students to learn on the job, gaining practical experience with emerging technologies at the same time as employers experiment with them.
That’s the case that apprenticeship intermediaries like CareerWise, which operates across 35 states, have been making to employers, states, and Congress. Institutions like Miami Dade College, which has been a leader in integrating AI into its programs, also have been exploring the role work-based learning can play—with the college last month launching a new AI Elite Talent Hub that embeds students in local companies for a year. Philanthropies also are starting to invest in earn-and-learn programs for the AI era.
Two $750K grants from Axim Collaborative—one to the California Community Colleges and the other to the University of North Carolina System—soon will test how that approach might work at scale at two large systems. The grants will support paid learning opportunities that put students to work on AI-related projects within their system.
In California, 40 students in the state’s community college system will receive a paid internship to work on an infrastructure project at one of the 116 campuses. In North Carolina, students from the UNC System’s 16 universities will work in registered apprenticeships on system-related projects, which the system is still identifying.
Both projects will get an assist from industry partners, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Elevate.
As AI becomes a bigger part of the workplace, students need a chance to put their skills to use, tackling the same real problems they might encounter in a job. Project leaders hope that combining a broad college education with practical experience and industry-recognized credentials will give students the knowledge and adaptability to navigate a rapidly changing job market. The bigger question is whether colleges can make that combination a sustainable part of how they prepare students for work.
Colleges, for their part, are scrambling to figure out how to make the most of AI, often without the money or expertise to move as quickly as they’d like. The grant programs could help both sides make some headway.
This approach meets a growing need as students seek work-integrated learning, says Philipp Schmidt, Axim’s senior vice president of technology innovation.
“These institutions are not building one-off pilots,” he says. “They’re developing a national standard for AI technician pathways that combines college instruction with on-the-job training and taps into existing funding streams to reach many more students in a sustainable way.”
And there’s little time to waste. Given how fast AI technology is advancing, these sorts of opportunities “feel less of a nice-to-have and more of a must-have,” says Tim Aldinger, vice president of workforce and climate innovation for the Foundation for California Community Colleges, the system’s nonprofit partner.
It’s also a chance for the system to observe what good-quality paid AI learning opportunities look like for students, he says.
“How does it actually help institutions gain capacity and improve their readiness and their fluency?” Aldinger asks. “That’s somewhat of a new space.”
Moving Beyond Pilots
For now, the grants will support a relatively small number of students and projects. But both systems are looking beyond the initial apprenticeships and internships, hoping to learn how they might expand these experiences to more students and campuses.
That means figuring out what works—from identifying suitable AI projects to providing students with the right training and supervision. It also means determining what it would take for colleges to sustain these programs after the grant money runs out, and whether the lessons learned in North Carolina and California could help other institutions launch similar efforts.
“All of us are in this moment now where we’re kind of tired of building these really wonderful but boutique programs,” says Cameron Sublett, senior director of innovation and incubation for the Foundation for California Community Colleges. “We have to start thinking about scale and replicability, getting beyond our own systems, across state borders so other folks in this space don’t have to start out on the 1-yard line and can build on the progress and momentum of others.”
Industry partners could play an important role in making that happen.
Kristi Wellington-Baker, U.S. higher education strategy lead for learner innovation at AWS, says technology companies can help colleges keep pace with developments already taking hold in the workplace. Businesses that adopted AI early, for example, are increasingly experimenting with AI agents that can carry out tasks with limited human intervention. Colleges, like most of the public sector, generally lag behind.
Sharing new insights can help colleges prepare students for the technologies they’re likely to encounter on the job, she says.
“One of the most valuable things about any educational experience is applied learning that mimics a workplace environment—understanding how you work with people, understanding how you take a project-based learning experience and apply it to something new,” she says.
Real Employers, Real Projects
In South Florida, Miami Dade College is already seeing what happens when those experiences extend well beyond a traditional internship.
The college’s AI Elite Talent Hub places students pursuing associate and bachelor’s degrees in applied AI with businesses that need help adopting the technology. Students spend roughly 10 months embedded in a company, working on real AI projects while continuing their coursework.
The program, launched in September, has already placed 25 students with businesses. It’s particularly aimed at smaller companies that want to use AI but lack the expertise or resources to hire experienced AI engineers or consultants. Companies get help with projects they might otherwise struggle to complete and students graduate with experience they can show prospective employers.
For students, the payoff goes beyond gaining practical experience, says Antonio Delgado, vice president of innovation and technology partnerships for Miami Dade College and founder of the National Applied AI Consortium. Working alongside employers gives them exposure to the tools businesses actually use, while helping the college identify gaps in its curriculum and provide additional training.
Initiatives like AI Elite will “help companies develop positions that they didn’t know how to create, and have the best and brightest students in AI to work within those companies on meaningful AI transformation for them,” Delgado says.
And because students participate throughout an entire academic year, they get a true “employee” experience: working alongside colleagues, navigating workplace challenges, and seeing projects through over time.
“I’m not talking anymore about, ‘Oh, you’re doing a capstone,’ or ‘You’re doing a co-op,’” he says. “We’ve had all those short-term types of work-based learning experiences. And now we’re going into, ‘No, the whole academic year before you graduate you spend it within the company doing real projects in AI transformation.’”
Training for a Moving Target
The real test of these apprenticeships may be how well they prepare students for the changes still to come.
AI’s ultimate impact on different industries is still very much an open question. That makes adaptability an especially important skill for college graduates entering the workforce, says Elizabeth Reilley, vice president of digital transformation and chief AI officer for the UNC System. The challenge is that no one can say with much certainty what skills employers will need five years from now, much less over the course of a student’s career.
The Axim apprenticeships within the UNC System, which are still in the design phase, will be built with that flexibility in mind, Reilley says. Participants will learn skills such as mapping business processes and identifying ways they could be made more efficient through the use of AI.
Knowing when to deploy AI and when another approach might work better will be a key part of the learning process for apprentices. Those judgment skills aren’t necessarily the province of computer science majors. Reilley says the system is looking for students who are curious, eager to learn, and capable of thinking critically, regardless of their academic backgrounds.
“We can teach folks those [AI] skills,” says Reilley, who majored in philosophy, “but I do think folks in the humanities are uniquely positioned to run forward.”
In California, the internships will take a similar approach, combining technical training with skills that students can carry from one job to another. Sublett calls that combination “applied co-intelligence” because it unites three kinds of skills: durable skills such as critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; technical skills specific to a particular project or occupation; and the ability to use AI effectively in that field.
That last piece is especially important, Sublett says. The challenge for colleges is to teach those skills without tying students’ education too closely to technologies that could quickly become outdated. That means keeping programs flexible and maintaining close relationships with employers who can help colleges stay abreast of changes in the workplace.
“That’s the guiding kind of framework we’re using for this project,” he says, “making sure that for any student that comes through, can we check off all three of those boxes?”