Businesses turn to internships to solve workforce challenges
Writer: Mirella Franzese
May 2025 — As America’s ongoing labor shortage continues to strain hiring and recruitment practices, U.S. employers are increasingly turning to internship experience when addressing workforce gaps.
Despite steady job creation, the number of unfilled positions continues to outpace employment growth, according to a recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“Even if every unemployed worker were to fill an open job within their respective industry, there would still be millions of unfilled job positions,” wrote Stephanie Ferguson Melhorn, senior director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Workforce & International Labor Policy department, in the report.
The bigger issue for most employers is finding qualified talent to fill open roles — which is why hiring departments are increasingly prioritizing internship experience over GPA or academic background when extending an offer.
READ MORE: U.S. employers prioritize skills as college degree ROI varies
Nearly two-thirds of American corporations use skills-based hiring practices when acquiring candidates for early-career roles, according to the National Association of College and Employers’ Job Outlook 2025 Spring Update.
Similarly, a student’s internship experience factors into the hiring decision much more than GPA alone — underscoring a strong employer preference for internship programs. In fact, 89% of U.S. employers intend to increase or maintain their new college graduate hiring practices for 2025, according to the NACE survey.
However, NACE recently revised their graduate hiring projection for this year — which originally forecast a 7.3% increase in the number of new graduates hired compared to the Class of 2024 — to just under 1% as of Spring 2025. The change has been attributed to recent tariff uncertainties, which have prompted staffing cutbacks across the nation.
Staffing remains particularly challenging in high-demand industries — such as education and healthcare, as well as professional, business, and financial services— where the number of unfilled job openings are consistently high and the rate of unemployment is low.
Employers in these industries have fewer qualified candidates to select from when filling job openings, leading to increased competition among businesses as they compete for a limited pool of available workers.
Internships help expand the labor pool, with most students saying their placements shaped their career path and industry interests, according to career networking platform Handshake, which surveyed over 6,000 students and recent graduates.
Eighty percent of students who completed internships throughout college were interested in accepting a full-time offer for their internship employer as a result of their experience, said the report.
American colleges and universities, however, currently face a shortfall in available work opportunities for their internship-seeking students. The number of U.S. internship postings has dipped by more than 15% between January 2023 and January 2025, while applicant volumes have grown from 34% to 41% over the same period of time.
With internships a growing priority, schools like Florida Southern College (FSC) are strengthening relationships with regional employers to meet evolving workforce needs.
FSC’s Barnett School of Business, for example, requires all students to complete internships before graduation, which is a testament to the school’s post-graduation job placement rate of 98.6%. (For reference, just 74.7% of recent graduates across the U.S. secured employment as of October 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.)
“It’s important for our school to understand what problems the organizations are trying to solve, and how each company is going to utilize interns,” Michael Weber, dean of the Barnett School of Business at FSC, told Invest:.
“Close employer relationships create a cycle of demand and success, with businesses returning for more interns and graduates, while hands-on experiences allow students to develop practical skills before entering the workforce,” added Weber.
The shift from traditional curricula to workforce-driven preparation has alleviated the strains of onboarding and streamlined the training process for businesses.
“College leaders have embraced the idea that their job is not just to teach but to prepare students for real careers,” said Sean Kennedy, the New Jersey director of the global consulting services firm, CGI. “Beyond offering internships, we have developed academic affiliation agreements with (local) schools, directly helping shape their curricula, so when students graduate from these institutions, they are already familiar with how companies like CGI operate.”
“They do not need months of onboarding because they have been trained with the skills and mindset we value,” added Kennedy.
For more information, visit:
https://www.cgi.com/us/en-us/newjersey
