Hybrid work and AI make it harder for employees to learn. Is your company ready to meet the challenge with apprenticeship?

Organizations that facilitate career development are three times more likely to delight customers, four times more likely to innovate effectively, and two-and-a-half times times more likely to exceed financial targets.¹ But hybrid work has weakened proximity‑based learning. Meanwhile, AI is compressing or removing many of the foundational tasks traditionally given to entry-level employees.

Apprenticeship, when made explicit and supported, is the most reliable mechanism to rebuild capability—70% of skills development happens through work, not training.² And as Deloitte’s own successful pilot program demonstrated, this work must be facilitated with current working conditions in mind.

Working conditions complicate essential learning

By 2030, 67% of the North American workforce is expected to require training, and employers say the top expected payoff is enhanced productivity (77%).³ The productivity stakes are highest for junior employees, who need more instruction and represent the internal talent pipeline for developing senior employees.

Unfortunately, hybrid work creates literal distance between employees and their managers. In this environment, skill transfer cannot depend on passive exposure or tenure. AI use can complicate learning even further:

• Employees need to learn how to use AI tools, which may be specific to the company
• Employees rely on AI outputs without sufficient judgment
• Managers lack time to review and correct AI‑assisted work
• Risk of long‑term deskilling and silent errors

Together, hybrid work and AI can create:

• Longer ramp‑up times for entry-level roles
• Inconsistent quality and increased rework
• Variable performance across teams in hybrid delivery

Fortunately, there is already a better approach.

Apprenticeship is how employees learn to be productive

Learning science shows that engaging with learning rather than consuming it is more effective.⁴ This is consistent with conversations from clients who report having learning content and platforms, but seeing little behaviour change. Information alone does not build skill, feedback on practice does.⁵

Employees in the early stage of their careers need apprenticeship.  

Apprenticeships replace the learning people miss in hybrid work by letting them actively do the work and learn by watching others. Hybrid apprenticeship requires explicit design choices to replace the learning once provided by repetition and physical proximity. In their place: a deliberate mix of repeatable work activities embedded in real delivery.

Implementing apprenticeships

Skill transfer happens when senior practitioners (guides) and junior employees (apprentices) take explicit responsibility for learning through shared work, with clear expectations on coaching, practice, and feedback.

Organizations must treat apprenticeship as a work operating model, not a one-off learning program. Leaders must design learning into the work, asking: where will practice, feedback, and observation happen this week? The resulting coaching is repeatable, visible, and scalable.

Eight everyday apprenticeship activities

Effective apprenticeship is built through eight everyday guide practices. These activities are how capable people make their judgment, standards, and methods visible to others:

1. Connecting. Treat every interaction as a possible learning moment. Guides help apprentices build relationships, access the right people, and understand how work really gets done across the organization.
2. Making expectations explicit. Clarify the goal, the role each person will play, the quality standard, the decision rights, and what good performance looks like before the work begins.
3. Sharing knowledge. Make experience visible. Guides share context, stories, working methods, judgment calls, shortcuts, mistakes, and lessons learned. Apprentices share progress, questions, and examples of how they are applying what they learn.
4. Working side by side. Use real work as the classroom. Guides and apprentices complete tasks together so guidance, correction, and support happen in the moment, while the work is still live.
5. Making expert practice observable. Invite apprentices to watch, listen, and notice how skilled people approach the work, including how they prepare, make trade-offs, handle pressure, and recover when things do not go as planned.
6. Using questions to surface thinking. Questions help both sides make reasoning visible. Guides ask apprentices to explain their choices, assumptions, and next steps. Apprentices ask for context, clarification, and the rationale behind decisions.
7. Creating safe practice reps. Build low-risk opportunities to try the work before the stakes are high. Practice allows apprentices to experiment, make mistakes, build confidence, and develop fluency before performing independently.
8. Calibrating through feedback. Give feedback that is specific, timely, and tied to the work. Strong feedback names the behaviour, explains the effect, clarifies the standard, and gives the apprentice a concrete next move.

Structured, timebound cycles create measurable behavior change, including:

• Faster, more predictable competencies
• Improved quality and reduced rework
• More consistent capability across teams
• More defensible return on learning investments
• Safer, more confident AI adoption
• Reduced operational and reputational risk

How AI can support the guide without replacing the guide

AI can make apprenticeship more targeted, consistent, and manageable, but it does not replace the guide’s role. Used well, AI helps guides prepare better questions, tailor practice scenarios to the apprentice’s role and proficiency level, summarize observed patterns, generate reflection prompts, and identify where additional support may be needed.

AI can also reduce the administrative load of apprenticeship by helping document goals, track progress, draft feedback notes, and create practice materials. The guide still provides what AI cannot: lived judgment, contextual interpretation, trust, emotional calibration, access to real work, and the credibility that comes from having performed the work themselves.

In other words, AI can help guides personalize and improve the apprenticeship experience, but the human guide remains the mechanism through which standards, judgment, confidence, and professional identity are developed.  

How can Deloitte help?

The success of Deloitte's own apprenticeship program gives us a solid basis for planning and evaluating any organization’s learning efforts. And because all learning environments are different, we offer a progressive range of options, including:

• Diagnostic sprints: Using a survey, targeted interviews, and document review, Deloitte can evaluate your organization's baseline apprenticeship maturity, pinpoint failure modes, and produce a prioritized roadmap.
• Pilot build: We will design and run an initial cohort with manager enablement, tools, and practice routines, with end-to-end measurement and a scale-ready playbook.
• Enterprise foundation: Starting with an enterprise operating model that includes governance, standards, measurement, and enablement assets, we can then stand up a scalable apprenticeship system for rollout across functions.

To learn more, contact our Learning Advisory leaders.