EY US is extending the traditional internship model for assurance students, introducing a paid Career Residency that will allow selected interns to continue working with the firm for another eight to 12 months while completing their university studies.
Under the new model, assurance students will still complete EY’s traditional eight-week internship. Selected participants will then be able to continue working part-time for the firm during their senior year, combining EY project work with coaching and skills development.
Business Insider reported that participants will remain employed part-time by EY, work remotely on firm projects and receive personalised coaching while continuing their college classes.
The programme is designed to develop skills including critical thinking, professional judgement, curiosity, AI and technology fluency, collaboration and communication. Business Insider reported that EY also plans to develop professional scepticism through simulations and real-world work.
The rationale goes directly to how AI is changing the traditional audit career model. In a separate explanation of its new early-career pathway, EY says AI is automating routine work and increasing the value of human judgement.
“Imagine starting your career in a world where AI can answer questions in seconds, generate content instantly and automate many of the routine tasks professionals once relied on to gain experience,” EY says.
The change could also affect where graduates enter EY’s career ladder.
Students who successfully complete the residency and subsequently receive a full-time offer will have the potential to join EY US as analysts. EY describes this as an “elevated role” reflecting the additional skills and experience gained during the residency.
Offers will also include a pay increase dependent on factors including performance, business needs and completion of the residency’s criteria and assessments, according to Business Insider.
The programme will initially apply to EY US assurance interns. EY will begin accepting applications for its inaugural Career Residency class this autumn, ahead of the first residents starting in January 2028.
Demand for EY internships appears strong. The firm told Business Insider that it received more than 24,000 applications from CPA-track students over the past year and extended 2,400 internship offers. Applications increased 33% year on year between 2025 and 2026.
Why it matters
The Career Residency addresses an increasingly important question for the audit profession: how do junior auditors acquire experience and professional judgement when AI performs more of the routine work through which previous generations learned the job?
EY is not alone in confronting that problem. In July, KPMG US redesigned the training of nearly 1,000 audit and assurance interns to place greater emphasis on judgement, fraud detection and critical thinking as AI assumes more of the routine testing traditionally performed by junior auditors. The KPMG programme included simulations and problem-solving exercises intended to develop precisely the human capabilities that become more important as repetitive audit work is automated.
The approaches are different. KPMG has redesigned what interns are taught, while EY is going further by changing how long selected interns remain inside the firm and where they may enter the career ladder. But both initiatives point to the same underlying problem: if technology removes some of the routine work on which junior auditors historically cut their teeth, firms need another way to build judgement and experience.
EY’s answer is to give selected students substantially more time inside the firm before they join full-time, while deliberately developing capabilities that become more important as routine tasks are automated — including judgement, critical thinking and professional scepticism.
The residency is part of a broader EY early-career pathway that also includes Skills Arcade, a training programme using simulated workplace scenarios, and 360 Careers, which gives participants broader exposure across areas including audit, tax and technology risk.
The experiment may therefore be worth watching beyond EY. AI is not simply changing how audits are performed; it is beginning to change how auditors are trained in the first place.
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