Professional career training in America

To protect you as a trainee and ensure that your traineeship benefits your professional development, your placement must meet criteria outlined by the US Department of State. When approaching US employers, make them aware that any international internship offer must meet the below requirements:

• It must be a training position and not a job
• It must be full-time – a minimum of 32 hours a week
• It must be office based, not remote
• It mustn’t involve more than 10% clerical or basic work, or include unskilled labour
• It must benefit your career and have a clear training plan
• It must be doing work that is additional to the employer’s normal staffing requirements
• A site visit may be required to assess your future employer’s workplace.

It is your responsibility to secure your own trainee position. Applicants come from different work backgrounds and have different career goals – and your traineeship should be a position that matches your experience and aspirations.

However, our team are here to assist you. We’ll give you advice on where previous applicants with your experience have trained, provide tips on how to lay out your US resume, and can recommend placement partners you can reach out to.

On this visa, there are some fields that are restricted. In general, you can’t have patient or person contact. For example, you can intern in medical research or nutrition development, but you can't work as a doctor or PT seeing patients or clients.

• Education You can’t work as a teacher or teaching assistant, but you can work in curriculum development, lesson planning and more.
• Oenology and Viticulture You can’t do fruit picking, vine and harvest work, but you can do fermentation management, distribution and more.
• Construction You can’t operate heavy machinery or intern as part of a work crew, but you can do project management, drafting and more.
• Healthcare and veterinary You can’t do clinical care or administer medication or procedures, but you can do observation-based internships.
• Hospitality Typically, hotels must be rated 4-star or higher and have broad operations to facilitate a comprehensive training in the hospitality field. For culinary training, restaurants must be a fine dining establishment in order to qualify.
• Social services You can’t work directly with patients, but you can do social work and policy (unpublished), community outreach and more.
• Sports and nutrition You can’t do coaching, physical therapy or personal training, but you can do Sports Medicine business management, food product development and more.
• Retail Traineeships must be management-focused, and typically include training in areas such as human resources practices, accounting, staffing practices, buying, merchandising and more.
• Sales You cannot do commission sales, sales quotas as part of evaluations and/or compensation, cold calls and direct sales, independent representation of host organisation on sales calls. But you can do forecasting, budgeting, sales analysis, presentation creation, client presentations under supervision, learning how to pitch sales, client management, learning sales management tools and attending client meetings.

This list is not exhaustive, so if your industry or planned internship falls under one of these categories – please give us a call and we can advise.

Founded in Canada in 1975, SWAP is focused on supporting Canadian students and travellers to earn and explore. JENZA is our global work and travel brand – focused on supporting students and 18-30s from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Latin America and Asia.

We have different brand names, but we're one team with one mission – with HQs in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Austraia and the US to help support you wherever you are.