Traineeships in America

You can work anywhere in the USA.

Different States are good for different industries but there are no restrictions on where you can work on a J-1 Trainee visa.

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• Social services You can’t work directly with patients, but you can do social work and policy (unpublished), community outreach and more.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.