Achieve Partners, a private equity firm, is using apprenticeship programs to close the AI talent gap for its portfolio companies-and the strategy is measurable on the bottom line. On an ACG Middle Market Growth podcast, co-founder and managing director Daniel Pianko said the firm's "earn-and-learn" model targets the very top of the talent funnel, directly driving EBITDA expansion by filling high-demand roles with trained, early-career workers.
The earn-and-learn model
Pianko, who launched Achieve Partners with partner Ryan Craig, looks for businesses where founders say they could grow faster or improve margins if they had more trained people. After acquiring a company in tech or healthcare services, the firm overlays a structured apprenticeship program. "60, 70, 80% of our value creation is specific traditional private equity stuff," Pianko said, but the training component is what sets the approach apart.
He compared the model to the analyst programs at investment banks. "Why would Goldman Sachs have hired me as a history major 23-year-old to become an investment banker? The reason why was they put me in a room with about 200 other 23-year-olds, and taught us accounting, finance, M&A … and at the end of that period, they handed me a business card saying, you're now a certified investment banker. Who certified me? Goldman Sachs." Achieve Partners brings that same logic to the lower mid-market, building pipelines into companies where a talent shortage is the main brake on growth.
How apprenticeships work in practice
The firm identifies the specific skills needed for a portfolio company's open roles, then recruits overlooked talent through partnerships with universities, the military, and workforce investment boards. Pianko noted a stark statistic: "50% of college graduates do not use their college degree in their first job." That pool of underemployed graduates becomes the feedstock for apprenticeship cohorts. Programs routinely draw 50 to 100-plus applicants per opening.
One example: a healthcare staffing business serving schools was strong in physical-care nurses but was missing the behavioral side-autism services, for instance. The founder said he couldn't find enough certified registered behavioral technicians (RBTs). Achieve invested, launched an RBT training program, and scaled that segment until it nearly matched the original physical-care revenue line at exit.
Similar mechanics played out at Optum Healthcare, which implements Epic electronic medical records in hospitals. Optum partnered with the University of North Florida to recruit recent graduates-bio or stats majors-who never considered healthcare IT. At exit, the company was training over a hundred analysts and programmers annually.
AI's influence on what gets taught
Pianko said the content of the apprenticeships has shifted sharply. "We spend much less time teaching people code right now. We are much more focused on … industry dynamics." As AI handles the rote tasks that used to occupy first-year analysts, the training now emphasizes business problem-solving, industry-specific expertise, and how to present strategic insights-skills that parallel the kind of strategic thinking covered in AI for Executives & Strategy resources.
He described the winning combination as a "cyborg" model: "Nothing is more powerful than an AI agent with a highly capable 23-year-old right now in the workforce." Across services firms-Salesforce implementations, employee performance management, logistics-apprentices paired with AI tools are creating new service lines. In logistics, for example, an AI bot and a young apprentice now negotiate with individual suppliers for better rates, compressing costs substantially. Pianko characterized the overall outlook as "cautiously optimistic but scared … we're following the classic hype cycle" and warned that while the technology will create jobs, the disruption will be real.
Why apprenticeships now
The core economic logic is labor arbitrage. "There are lots and lots of 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds who did everything right. They went to school, got a degree in a STEM field, they got good grades … and they still can't find a good first job," Pianko said. The firm pays these apprentices roughly $30 an hour with full benefits and bills them out at $100,000 to $150,000 annually. Margins on apprentices are substantively higher than on fully trained hires, making the model a direct contributor to EBITDA growth.
What executives should do now
Pianko's top recommendation for business leaders is simple: have the CEO start using AI personally. "Lead by example. Get a cloud subscription, actually code something … take one thing that you do off your plate with AI." He also described a practice that's proving effective in portfolio companies: telling employees their jobs are protected for one year, no matter what, to create psychological safety during the transition. "At the end of a year, you know, who knows? But what that does is it gives the employee base some level of security as they embrace this technological shift."
Why this matters for executives and strategy
For strategy leaders, Achieve's model is a concrete rebuttal to the narrative that AI only destroys jobs. It shows how services firms can turn a talent bottleneck into a margin engine by building their own pipeline of hybrid human-AI workers. The approach does not require massive upfront technology deployments-it starts with identifying the skill gaps that are capping growth, partnering with local universities, and structuring a paid earn-and-learn pathway. Executives who replicate even pieces of this playbook can reduce hiring costs, speed AI adoption, and create a competitive moat around hard-to-fill roles.
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