One of the arguments in The Human Curriculum, the book I have been researching on rebuilding education for the age of artificial intelligence (AI), gets the same reaction every time I try it on someone: we already have internships. We do not, not in the sense I mean. What we have is a ten-week summer arrangement with no curriculum, no credential, and usually no pay. What I am arguing for is the thing Germany has done for a century, moved from the workshop floor to the office.
What Germany Actually Does
Around half of German school leavers enter the dual system each year: a paid, multi-year apprenticeship split between a company and a vocational school, across more than 300 state-recognized occupations, ending in a credential that employers across the sector trust. It takes two to three and a half years. It is almost entirely trades and technical work, which is the point I want to make and the limit I want to push past. The model is proven. It has simply never been applied to the jobs most people now do. The numbers are public if you want them.
The Ladder Is Missing Its Bottom Rungs
The entry-level white-collar job was always the apprenticeship, we just never called it that. The first-year analyst who builds the deck, the junior who reconciles the numbers, the associate who drafts the memo the partner rewrites. Nobody learned much in school about doing those things well. They learned by doing them badly for two years next to someone who did them well.
Those are also the tasks automation reaches first, because they are the most structured, the most repeated, and the most correctable. I run a team with no engineers on it and I know exactly how much of a first-year analyst's week an agent can do. If the bottom rungs go, the ladder does not get shorter. It gets unclimbable, because the rungs were where the trade was learned. That is the urgency, and it is why I think the track has to be designed now rather than discovered later.
What the Track Looks Like
| The internship we have | The track I am arguing for | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Ten weeks, one summer | Two to three years |
| Pay | Token, or none | A wage, rising with each year |
| Split | All office | Three days at the company, two at school, or a block rotation |
| Curriculum | Whatever the team is doing that month | Agreed by the sector: writing, statistics, the domain, the tools |
| Ends with | A line on a resume | A credential the whole sector recognizes, and a list of things you can demonstrably do |
| Roles | Mostly whatever is available | Analyst, product operations, sales development, compliance, project coordination |
The school half teaches what the office will not: how to write, how to reason from data, what the industry is. The office half teaches what school cannot: judgment, and the far more valuable skill of recognizing when the rule does not apply. Neither works alone. That is why it is a dual system and not a longer internship.
The Objections
Employers will not pay to train people who leave. Germany's answer is the sector credential: a trained person is valuable to the whole sector, poaching averages out, and the chambers that coordinate the system make sure the training is standard enough that it does. Universities will object that this is an attack on the degree. It is not, it is a second door, and the students who take it are largely the ones the first door was never going to serve well. And status, which is the hardest one. The German trades track carries little stigma because the credential carries weight. An American office track would have to earn that, and the only way to earn it is for the first cohorts to be visibly good.
There is a harder claim underneath all this, which is that the four-year degree as the default entrance to office work was a postwar accident that automation is now ending. I am less sure of that than I am of the rest, and the research is what will decide it. But I am sure of the smaller thing: the way people learned office work is going away, and nobody has built the replacement.