Buzz and the Bottleneck

There is a growing recognition that students need real exposure to careers and work experience during high school and postsecondary education, fueled by AI’s disruption to the job market and falling confidence in the ROI of higher education. These experiences must fit a progression - from career exploration to job shadow to internship to employment - in order to help students make the right decisions about their postsecondary investments and be truly prepared to meet rising employer expectations for skills. 

Unfortunately, we don’t currently have infrastructure or supply to meet this demand. Between 2023 and 2025 alone, internship postings on Handshake fell 15%, while applicants rose 21% (Handshake). The Business Higher Ed Forum estimates that only one third of college students seeking high quality internship experiences find them (BHEF). 

The uncomfortable truth is that today’s methods for curating work experience for students - primarily institutions or third parties recruiting employers one by one - will never scale to give every student access to the volume of opportunities they need. 

Many of the buzziest work-aligned training programs serve only a few hundred students a year. Apprenticeship giant Multiverse (my former employer) shuttered US operations last year, citing challenges with recruiting employers. Meanwhile schools are using scarce resources to hire employer partnership leads - with mixed results. 

The gap is immense, and growing. How will our educational institutions ever be able to deliver?

The Experience Paradox

Most organizations turn to recruiting enterprise employers to offer experiences for their students: internships, job shadowing, or classroom projects. These are the employers with sophisticated HR functions and capacity to design programming and potentially host multiple students, so the instinct makes sense.

But more and more, this doesn't work. Large employers are being contacted simultaneously by high schools, workforce intermediaries, project-based learning providers, and higher ed institutions. Despite their size, the number of actual placements they can offer is limited, and most of them don't need interns to fill their roles in the first place, so their motivation to engage with multiple partners or scale their pilots can be low.

I saw this firsthand during my career in apprenticeship programming, across a range of providers. Employer engagement with corporations is slow and tedious, requires sign-off from multiple departments, and despite hours of engagement conversations, often yields only a few placements at a time.

Other solutions propose simulations and digital experiences. These are a helpful starting point, but can't possibly recreate the power of in-person experiences in shaping student understanding of careers, passions and strengths, or durable skills on the job (a post for another day).

Closing this gap requires tapping a different pool of supply, and tapping it more effectively. At Curiously, we had two realizations of how we can solve this problem efficiently, without repeating the status quo:

1. Local Small Businesses Are Under-Utilized Hosts

Think back to your first real work experience. Was it an internship you landed through a competitive application process at a major corporation, or at a local organization where you learned to show up on time, work with customers, and solve problems on the fly? Did you pick your current career path by reading articles online, or speaking with real people about their perspectives, experiences, and advice?

Small businesses are underutilized sources of work-based learning, and where most of today's professionals got their start. They have a tremendous amount to offer students: visibility into entrepreneurship and business ownership, exposure to multiple functions within a single operation, and a level of agency and independence rarely available at a large company. They can move quickly, and many have a genuine interest in growing local talent, especially when there's a real connection to their community.

The challenge is that small businesses can't be recruited into formal programs at scale and are unlikely to host large cohorts of students at a time. They are often disinterested in posting roles online and sifting through thousands of resumes, and might not be able to predict capacity or needs.

2. Student Initiation Grows Supply

As we began our research with small and medium-size organizations, the same pattern kept surfacing: they'd never set out to host an intern, but they'd hired young people they had a personal connection to, and were willing and flexible to open their doors when someone from their community asked for a chance. 

One city leader shared her own internship story with our team recently. Her office wasn't planning to offer an internship — hosting a young person had seemed stressful in an already stretched environment. But a high school student had reached out and asked for an informational interview, and had impressed them so much on the phone call that when she asked for an internship, they created the role for her. A year later, she's still interning with them.

We extended our research to professionals, asking about how they got their first jobs, and they said the same thing: “I asked.”

Then we spoke to counselors, and they repeated this pattern: the students who successfully found work experience were those who initiated the opportunities themselves — going door to door to local businesses, tapping into their networks, and demonstrating a willingness to work hard and be curious.

These stories pointed toward a powerful opportunity: when young people have the skills and confidence, even audacity, just to ask for an opportunity, they are often greeted with a “yes.” And on the other side of the equation, there are organizations who might not necessarily be drawn to the idea of having "an intern," but when they meet an impressive young person, think "well I'd like to work with THIS intern!"

A student-driven model for work-based learning sounds out of the ordinary, because we've never tried to build systems around it. But it's actually the primary way students get opportunities. A study by BHEF shows this at scale: 87% of employers with interns report hiring at least one as a direct response to that student's inquiry or a personal referral.

The secret sauce of this method: employers are impressed by initiation. Who doesn't love a young person who shows up prepared, enthusiastic, confident, and curious?

Teaching Students to Grow the Experience Pie

Student initiation grows supply because students can reach more businesses, and do so more effectively, than other institutional solutions.

For too long, we have treated those skills as innate, or relied on parents to do the modeling and connecting for them. And in part, rightfully so: there are a lot of steps and mental blocks to initiation, particularly for a generation that grew up behind screens and has absorbed the message that they don't have permission to ask for opportunities. But when we give them the skills and tools, we can teach them to open their own doors to opportunity.

An organization can spend 20 hours recruiting a small handful of employer partners, or they can spend that same time empowering hundreds of students to take matters into their own hands, simultaneously teaching them the most important job-seeking skills they'll need later in their careers.

At Curiously, we’re betting on students: their brilliance, relationships, and curiosity. We can’t wait to show you what they can do.