Almost every university now agrees that work experience belongs inside the degree.
The harder question is one of capacity: how do you offer authentic, real-world experience to hundreds or thousands of students without the model collapsing under its own administrative weight?
The honest answer is that the traditional placement model does not scale, and the institutions widening access fastest are the ones that have accepted this and designed around it.
The classic work-integrated learning setup, a bespoke placement, individually sourced, individually supervised, produces excellent experiences for a limited number of students.
Its strength is also its constraint. Every placement depends on a staff member finding an employer, negotiating the arrangement, monitoring the student, and handling the logistics when something changes.
Research on work-integrated learning has repeatedly flagged the same issue: the workload it generates for university staff is significant, often under-recognized in academic workload models, and rarely sustainable at scale.
When a program tries to grow a hand-built model from fifty students to five hundred, the coordination burden grows with it, and it lands on careers teams and faculty who are already stretched.
The result, at many institutions, is a "boutique" pattern: a handful of excellent, high-touch experiences reserved, often unintentionally, for the students who already know how to find and access them.
That is the opposite of what widening participation is meant to achieve.
The goal is not to strip the human parts out of work-based learning.
The parts that make it valuable, authentic briefs, real feedback, reflection, evidence of skill development, genuine employer engagement, are precisely the parts worth protecting. Scaling well means protecting those elements while removing the manual coordination that does not need a human at all.
In practice, the institutions doing this share a few moves:
They shift from bespoke to repeatable pathways. Instead of sourcing every placement individually, they use structured, supported experiences that can be offered to many students at once, while keeping the briefs authentic and the feedback real.
They let a system carry the coordination. Matching, onboarding, scheduling, progress tracking, and documentation are exactly the tasks that eat staff time and do not require staff judgment. Moving them to a platform frees the team to spend their time on the parts that do.
They design for access, not just excellence. A rigid, city-centric, unpaid, 9-to-5 placement quietly excludes the students who cannot relocate, cannot work for free, or have caring responsibilities. Remote and flexible models widen the door to the students who need the experience most.
They build in the evidence. Because the experience runs through a structured system, participation and outcomes are captured as a byproduct, which, as earnings-based accountability rises up the agenda, is becoming valuable in its own right.
The instinct, when a program wants to offer more work experience, is to ask how much staff time it will cost, because under the traditional model, more experience has always meant more workload.
The more useful question is different: which parts of this genuinely need our people, and which parts are just coordination we have been absorbing by hand?
When the answer is honest, most of the burden turns out to be logistics. And logistics is the part that scales, through structure and systems, without asking your team to do more.
That is what makes it possible to move from a boutique offering for the few to genuine access for the many, which is where the sector conversation has clearly landed heading into 2026.
Employability for a lucky subset was never the goal. Building the infrastructure so that real experience is available to every student, without breaking the team that runs it, is the version worth building toward.
Virtual Internships provides the structure and platform that let universities scale real, remote work experience across programs, protecting the authentic parts while automating the coordination, so more students get access without more workload for your team.