Written By: Ginger Ontiveros, President & Chief Executive Officer
California Is Raising the Value of Internships. Is Your System Ready?
California schools have a new reason to take a close look at internships.
A recent decision by the California State Board of Education creates a new opportunity for qualifying work-based learning internships to contribute to a school’s College/Career Indicator (CCI). To qualify, an internship must be 50 hours or more, sponsored by the local educational agency (LEA), completed as part of a course offered by the LEA, and result in the student earning a rating of Meets Expectations or better on an employer performance evaluation.
The decision builds on several years of work by the California Department of Education (CDE) to define high-quality work-based learning. CDE describes internships as workplace experiences that apply classroom learning and connect students, instructors, and employer or community partners in supporting student safety, success, and progress.
For school leaders, this creates an exciting opportunity to connect three priorities: improving CCI outcomes, giving students meaningful exposure to the real world of work, and building sustainable relationships with employers.
But there is a catch.
Finding the internship is only one part of the work.
Building the System Around the Opportunity
When schools approach Tomorrow’s Talent, two requests come up again and again: We need internships for our students, and we need sustainable employer partners willing to provide them.
Both are true. But experience has taught us that employer opportunities alone do not create a successful internship program.
Schools need a work-based learning system, meaning the people, processes, relationships, preparation, and compliance infrastructure that move a student from career awareness to successful participation in a workplace experience.
Most schools already have pieces of that system. The gaps tend to reveal themselves when everyone needs those pieces to work together.
Consider two experiences from our work.
One district came to us with a modest goal: create internship opportunities for 10 students. Opportunities were developed, but only one student ultimately started an internship.
There was no single point of failure. Instead, the experience exposed gaps common when schools have pieces of an internship program without a fully connected system. Students had been recruited largely by asking who was interested, without enough attention to employment readiness. About half of those advanced as candidates turned out to be ineligible for work permits. Some students identified through particular career pathways were not especially interested in careers in those fields. And when aligned opportunities became available, reaching students and motivating them to act at the speed employers needed proved difficult.
Now consider a contrasting experience.
When Tomorrow’s Talent began working with Compton Unified School District, the initial goal was 70 internships supporting one career pathway. The district leaned into the broader system, coordinating closely, addressing student readiness, and allowing employer development and student preparation to move together.
By the end of that first year, 214 students had actually participated in internships, more than three times the original goal.
The difference was not simply access to more employers. It was what happened around those opportunities.
An internship opportunity is an input. A student successfully participating in that internship is the outcome. Between the two sits a system.
Students Need Exposure Before Opportunity
Student interest alone is not student readiness.
Many young people understandably gravitate toward employers whose names they recognize. Others assume they need to be a perfect match for an internship before an employer will consider them. Still others may have selected a career pathway without yet having enough exposure to understand the occupations within it.
Career speakers, workplace tours, job shadows, mentoring, and other forms of work-based learning help bridge that gap. They introduce students to employers and occupations they may never have encountered and build something harder to measure but essential to internship success: the confidence and agency to raise a hand, submit an application, answer an email, and show up.
Then come the practical requirements. Students may need government identification, transportation, a work permit, a resume, interview preparation, workplace expectations, and the ability to respond quickly when an employer is ready.
Employers Need Support, Too
Employers generally do not expect teenagers to arrive as polished professionals. Learning is the point. But they do need students who are prepared to participate and school partners who can operate at something closer to the speed of business.
Employers have readiness needs of their own. Some worry about liability or the administrative requirements associated with employing minors. Others want to participate but have never structured an internship, supervised a teenager, or translated everyday work into a productive learning experience.
Support with internship design, supervision, youth employment requirements, and, when appropriate, employer-of-record services can reduce those barriers and make participation manageable.
This matters because employer capacity is not unlimited. Budgets change. Managers get busy. Priorities shift. An opportunity available today may not survive a lengthy approval process or several unanswered student emails. And a failed first experience with a new employer can close the door.
Sustainable Employer Relationships Need an Owner
There is another part of the system that receives less attention: relationship continuity.
Employer partnerships have to be developed, nurtured, and renewed. In many schools, that responsibility falls to a teacher who is simultaneously responsible for instruction, students, and family relationships. At the district level, one dedicated staff member may hold years of employer history in their contacts and memory.
Then that person changes roles or leaves.
Too often, the relationships leave with them.
A sustainable system makes employer engagement an institutional asset rather than a collection of personal contacts. Someone knows when an employer last participated, what worked, what did not, who the internal champion is, what kinds of students fit the environment, and when it is time to reconnect.
This is one of the less visible roles an intermediary can play. An intermediary-supported system provides a kind of institutional insurance. Relationships, history, expectations, and processes can persist through staffing changes, while employers have a consistent point of connection and educators can focus on the work only they can do with students.
From Counting Internships to Maximizing Their Impact
CDE’s analysis provides another reason to pay attention to quality. Among the 2024-25 cohort, 19,124 students had internship data submitted, but only 6,206 met the high-quality standard CDE was evaluating. Of those students, 76 percent were already classified as Prepared under existing CCI criteria, compared with 51.7 percent of students statewide. The numbers show an association rather than proving that internships caused the difference, but they are an encouraging signal.
California’s CCI changes create an incentive to expand high-quality internships. They also invite schools to think more deeply about what has to surround an internship for it to count and, more importantly, for it to work.
Fifty hours requires persistence. Positive experience requires workplace readiness and collected employer evaluations require follow up. LEA sponsorship requires ownership and sound processes. Course connection requires the experience to be integrated into learning.
Add work permits, government identification, transportation, student communication, employer preparation, supervision, legal compliance, and long-term relationship management, and the lesson becomes clear:
The goal is not simply to find more internships. It is to build a system that reliably converts opportunity into student participation and success.
At Tomorrow’s Talent, we have learned that developing employer opportunities is only one part of that system. Just as important is connecting everything around them: helping students become ready and confident enough to act, helping employers become effective partners, helping schools navigate the processes that make participation possible, and maintaining relationships so each new school year does not mean starting over.
As districts consider what California’s CCI changes mean for their work-based learning strategies, perhaps the most useful question is no longer: How many internships can we find?
It is: how do we maximize the impact of internships on our CCI scores and, more importantly, on our students?