The 12th National Apprenticeship Week, from April 26 to May 2, invites donors in the age of A.I. to examine how they can rebuild the first rung of the career ladder through work-based learning.
Artificial intelligence is not making work disappear. It’s changing how work is learned. That distinction matters.
Conversation about AI often swings between dreamy promises and doomsday warnings. But a deeper problem is less dramatic and more consequential: AI is undermining entry-level jobs and the first rung of the career ladder.
For decades, entry-level jobs did more than produce output; they developed people. Junior employees drafted memos, assembled background research, cleaned data, wrote code, handled customers, and supported projects.
These often repetitive and modest tasks served a larger purpose. They helped novice workers absorb tacit knowledge, workplace norms, professional judgment, and personal responsibility under real conditions with adult supervision.
Now, many of those routine tasks are done faster by AI systems. AI isn’t eliminating whole occupations so much as reorganizing expertise inside them. The need to perform routine tasks shrink, while oversight, synthesis, judgment, and client-facing work become more valuable. The work remains, but the developmental pathway changes.
That creates a serious social problem. If employers need fewer beginners to do the tasks that once trained beginners and integrated them into the workforce, then the economic case for hiring large numbers of novice employees weakens.
Consequently, entry-level jobs become harder to get and (paradoxically) require prior experience. Opportunity narrows, especially for young people and for those without family networks, elite credentials, or social capital.
This’s why work-based learning deserves fresh philanthropic attention.
Work-based learning isn’t just another education and training reform. It’s civic infrastructure. It offers newcomers a way to learn punctuality, communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and professional judgment.
This type of learning connects schools, employers, nonprofits, and communities, strengthening the institutions of civil society that mediate between the individual and the state. This viewpoint emphasizes philanthropy’s role in strengthening civil society and expanding human opportunity. The case for donor action is especially strong because work-based learning rarely scales on its own.
Schools struggle to build relationships that direct graduates into stable employment. Employers want talent but often lack the time or incentives to supervise beginners. Nonprofits can broker partnerships, but they need flexible capital. Public systems can support these efforts, but they are often fragmented and slow.
That is where philanthropy matters most.
Donors should begin with a simple principle: every young person should have a means to learn. A practical corollary is that career education should span the spectrum from learning about work to learning through work to learning at work.
Exposure to different occupations matters but work experience matters even more. Sustained work-based learning—job shadows, internships, apprenticeships, client-connected projects, school-based enterprises, and career mentorships—can’t be extras given to a fortunate minority. They should be part of the basic architecture of opportunity for all young people.
So, what can donors do?
First, fund intermediaries, not just programs. A major barrier to work-based learning is support of the people who coordinate programs and connections. Someone has to recruit employers, prepare students, align calendars, manage transportation, solve liability questions, and keep partnerships alive. Those connector functions are easy to overlook and hard to fund. Donors can support the local nonprofits, chambers of commerce, industry groups, and civic organizations that do this connecting.
Second, invest in the missing link between school and work. Too often, philanthropy supports either classroom reform or postsecondary completion but neglects the transition between them. But those transitions are where many young people are lost. Donors can back paid internships, summer bridge programs, youth apprenticeships, employer-sponsored mentorships, and post-high-school coaching that help students convert exposure into momentum.
Third, support quality, not just participation. A weak internship that amounts to little more than filing papers doesn’t prepare anyone for an AI-reorganized labor market. High-quality work-based learning includes supervision, meaningful tasks, feedback, reflection, and growing responsibility. Donors can insist that funded efforts measure whether students are actually producing work, building skills, earning credentials, and making successful transitions into jobs or further education.
Fourth, widen the map of who gets access. In many communities, work-based learning is concentrated in selective programs or among students who already have advantages. Donors can prioritize rural communities, low-income students, first-generation college-goers, and young adults who are working while studying or trying to reconnect after high school. If AI risks concentrating opportunity among insiders, philanthropy should do the opposite.
Fifth, help build a culture that honors multiple pathways to competence. Too much of American education still sends a narrow message. Success means seat time first, work later. But many young people need, and want, a more applied path that combines earning, learning, and advancement. Supporting work-based learning is not anti-college; it is pro-opportunity. It reflects a broader principle of opportunity pluralism, namely, that there are many legitimate routes to adult competence and contribution.
Philanthropy often does its best work by seeing an institutional gap before government or markets fully recognize it. That is the opportunity here.
AI may lower the cost of producing information, but it does not lower the cost of becoming a knowledgeable and mature worker. Judgment needs to be formed; responsibility needs to be practiced; confidence needs to be earned. People still learn by doing.
If the entry-level job no longer reliably provides adequate developmental experience, then donors should help build new on-ramps that do. In the years ahead, one of the most important tests of a healthy society will be whether young people and newcomers have places to learn about work by working.
The result is more than a workforce strategy. It’s an investment in civil society, human dignity, and the institutions that help one generation prepare the next. That’s exactly the work donors are well-positioned to support.
Bruno V. Manno is a senior adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute and leads its Pathways to Opportunity What Works Lab. He is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy. Follow him on LinkedIn.
