Rushing To The Office: As The Labor Market Tightens, Students Are Starting Internships, Career Coaching Much Earlier

It’s no secret that the job market has tightened up over the last several months. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that employers had added 911,000 fewer jobs between March 2024 and March 2025 than originally reported. 

While this news is worrying for everyone, it’s particularly stressful for current college students whose post-grad career prospects now seem a lot less certain. In an effort to give themselves a competitive edge in the post-grad world, many of them are starting internships and career coaching much earlier.

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New data from Handshake, a career site for students, found that 14.6% of the class of 2028 had already applied for at least one internship by the midpoint of their freshman year. This is compared to just 3% of the class of 2024 at the same stage in their educational careers, Bloomberg says.

Two career coaches who spoke to Bloomberg also say that students and their families are courting their services far earlier than normal. 

“Lately I’ve had an elevated number of requests for multi-year coaching packages starting as early as freshman year,” Lesley Milter, founder of career coaching firm Priority Candidates told Bloomberg.

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Jill Tipograph, who runs her own career coaching company, has had a similar experience. “”I just had a conversation with another family who contacted us literally when their child got into college. We went through a discussion and now we’re starting all the work,” she told Bloomberg. “This is a growing norm.”

The students who are rushing into the office say that watching upperclassmen struggle to find gainful employment post-grad has been a motivating factor for their own decisions.

“It was kind of intimidating seeing all these older kids who have such good experiences and such good skill sets are still not landing a job post-grad,” Santa Clara University sophomore Nailia Ahsan said. “It definitely does factor into thinking, ‘Ok, I need to be as proactive as early as possible so I can mitigate the risk later.'”

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Fear has been a major incentive for parents as well. Krish Sastry, a Bay Area parent who hired a coach from Milter’s firm for his sophomore son, told Bloomberg he sees this sort of early career intervention as a way to gain an edge in a world where AI is making many entry-level jobs redundant. 

“It’s about risk mitigation,” he said.

Sastry isn’t alone in his concerns about AI affecting entry-level jobs. In a separate Handshake survey, 61% of the Class of 2026 said that they were pessimistic about their career prospects in some part because of generative AI. 

While Handshake says it hasn’t seen a decisive trend in hiring slowdowns due to AI yet, there’s always a possibility of things moving that way. With that in mind, getting all the workplace experience you can before earning your diploma seems like just good old common sense. 

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