Archives

Picture two people working at a winery: an intern and an apprentice.

The intern spends three to six months exploring the industry, building professional networks, rotating through different departments, honing customer service skills, and getting a feel for whether a career in the wine industry is right for him. When he leaves, he has some strong connections, industry experience and skills, and more information to guide future career decisions. The employer has had a chance to observe his work before making long-term commitments.

The apprentice at the same winery has a different experience entirely. She spends two to four years working under the supervision of a master winemaker, combining that with courses in plant science and microbiology. Her wages increase as she becomes more skilled and productive. At the end of the program, she has an industry-recognized credential – in some programs a degree – and she is an entry-level professional. The winery has grown its own talent, someone who knows the winery’s systems, processes, equipment, and culture.

Both internships and apprenticeships are valuable work-based learning strategies, but they are not the same thing. For employers, they solve fundamentally different talent problems: one about finding the right fit and another about cultivating a professional with skills that are hard to find or retain otherwise. After years of researching apprenticeship programs, I have seen confusion about these definitions come up again and again as a barrier to scale. It’s one of the problems I’m eager to tackle at UpSkill America.

The difference between internships and apprenticeships

Internships and apprenticeships serve different purposes. Internships tend to be shorter, less structured, and focused on exploration and evaluating whether someone is a good fit for the workplace and the role. Apprenticeships are designed for occupations that require more rigorous training – especially in hands-on, industry-specific skills.

Internships can be applied across a wide range of roles and organizations, while apprenticeships (with a focus on advancing hands-on learning) are suitable for a more specific range of job roles and skill requirements. If the local labor market already has plenty of candidates with the skills for a particular job opening, there is no need to hire an apprentice to build those skills but an internship could help the employer make sure someone is a good fit before making a long-term hiring decision.

Employers can also choose from a wider array of work-based learning solutions as they assemble a broader talent strategy, including short-term credentials, co-operative experiences (common in engineering), or other forms of professional development. The question is not which one is better, but which one is fit for purpose.

Internships and apprenticeships can both help reduce hiring costs and build pipelines for early-career populations into quality jobs, but they are useful to employers at different stages. Treating them as strategic investments aligned with a specific business need is likely to improve success. Employers are likely to see the impacts of internships sooner than apprenticeships through factors such as higher retention compared to hires that were not interns. However, apprenticeships consistently pay for themselves within one to five years.

Internships and apprenticeships can build on each other

In the winery example, if the intern discovers a passion for the winemaking process, he can then decide to apply to the apprenticeship program. In that sense, apprenticeships and internships do not have to compete for employer attention, but instead employers can leverage them sequentially. Before agreeing to take the intern on for a longer-term investment, the winery can reduce the risk of the apprenticeship because the internship gives them a sense of which candidates they want to invest in further.

Why the distinction matters

Treating internships and apprenticeships as interchangeable is not just imprecise, it produces real costs:

• The wrong-tool problem: if an employer needs a worker with highly specialized skills that take a long time to master, and they use an internship model instead of an apprenticeship, then they could end up paying a lot more for continued training and professional development after the employer hires them on as a full-time employee.
• The skepticism problem: if an employer has been sold on apprenticeships as a solution, but all they really need is something lighter-touch, they may find that the investment feels like overkill and generalize that apprenticeships do not work. Similarly, if someone goes into an apprenticeship thinking it will teach them advanced skills in a profession, and what they get is much less in-depth, they will likely emerge disappointed from the experience with no clear path forward.
• The collaboration problem: if employers, educators, and other partners in the ecosystem mean different things by “internship” or “apprenticeship,” they are likely to experience a high level of friction and miscommunication because everyone is operating from a different understanding.
• The research problem: if “apprenticeships” can mean ten weeks or four years, aggregate data and comparisons become meaningless. It is not possible to benchmark programs, set expectations, or build an evidence base with inconsistent definitions.
• The watered-down policy problem: if short-term training programs are relabeled as apprenticeships to access funding, scarce resources get diverted away from the deeper investments that build professional-level workforce capacity. Filling internship slots can help identify future winemakers, but it will not produce them.

Recommendations

Several states have already begun building shared definitions across the full spectrum of work-based learning. More states should follow this lead. That means building on existing frameworks and classifying existing programs within them, establishing clear progressions so learners know how to move from an internship to an apprenticeship (or another program) as part of a coherent career path, and clarifying both the type and level of learning to promote smooth transitions between higher education and work-based options. All learning counts. Clear roadmaps help everyone navigate what is otherwise a fragmented, confusing landscape.

The employer that uses internships to find talent with the passion, skills, and interests they are seeking, as well as an apprenticeship program to cultivate them into a skilled professional, has a stronger talent strategy than one that treats either as a substitute for the other. A policy ecosystem with clear definitions and roadmaps for navigation will give everyone what they need to make the system work for them.

Filling internships can spark a career, but it cannot build a profession on its own. Knowing how to weave these tools together is where good talent strategy begins.