Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship offers full-time roles to high school graduates, directly competing with elite universities like Brown. This radical talent acquisition strategy bets that on-the-job training and a customized curriculum can create better employees than traditional higher education.

The best test of knowledge is the ability to teach it. By having employees explain a new AI tool or workflow to their peers, they are forced to solidify their own understanding and identify knowledge gaps. This process turns passive learning into active expertise.

While community impact is a benefit, the most effective metric for work-based learning is tangible skill acquisition. Success should be measured by the specific, career-ready skills a student gains, ideally tied to third-party industry certifications that offer a clear ROI.

Waterloo's unique program of alternating study and work terms gives students six chances to try different industries and company sizes. This removes the "job-hopping" stigma, provides practical engineering experience, and helps them discover their passions early, creating highly effective graduates.

The tech industry often makes technical roles sound intimidating by equating them with coding. To attract new talent, companies should create apprenticeship programs, similar to those for electricians, that focus on practical skills like deploying vendor technology. This reframing makes the field more accessible to a wider pool of candidates.

An underrated benefit of internship programs is the positive impact on current employees. Taking on a mentorship role provides them with growth opportunities and increases their own engagement, contrary to the common belief that it is merely an added burden.

Young people may understand new AI tools but lack the context to apply them for business value. The opportunity lies in pairing their tech fluency with business process knowledge, teaching them how to generate actual ROI from AI—a critical skill gap across the entire workforce.

Unlike purely theoretical coursework, programs sponsoring real industry problems allow students to build applicable skills. An engineer designed a fuel cell test station for a senior project, which directly led to an internship where his first task was to recreate that same project, proving the value of practical experience.

Instead of learning skills based solely on personal interest, a more strategic approach is to identify the biggest, most expensive pain points in your target industry. Then, deliberately acquire the specific skills needed to solve those problems, making yourself an invaluable asset before you even apply.