No resume, college degree or traditional job interview were required for the 50 workers who just graduated from an artificial intelligence apprenticeship program in Northern Virginia.
Enabled Intelligence, a Falls Church startup creating AI model training data for defense and intelligence agencies, wrapped its eight-month program on Wednesday in partnership with the Department of Labor — and hired all of the apprentices as full-time employees, per chief people officer Lauren Bacon Smith. All participants are specifically trained in data annotation.
“We are training people from the ground up.”
Lauren Bacon Smith, Enabled Intelligence
“Most of our team members, this is their first corporate professional job,” Smith told Technical.ly. “We are training people from the ground up.”
Instead of screening resumes to weed out non-traditional applicants, Enabled Intelligence vets candidates through assessments that evaluate pattern recognition and attention to detail, she said. That’s true across the startup’s bootcamps, internships and full-time positions.
That attention to detail is a big requirement for the data annotator position, which includes identifying specific objects in satellite geospatial images.
In addition to learning technical skills and getting necessary security clearances, apprentices also learned professional development tools like time management and office etiquette, Smith said.
Local workforce development startup BuildWithin, which developed an agentic AI tool for DMV job seekers to find work, also contributed to this program, she said, helping make sure apprentices were meeting federal requirements and staying on schedule.
Enabled Intelligence hired 28 other apprentices this spring, and plans to bring on as many as 40 more in the next six months, she said. The startup is also expanding to have a presence in St. Louis, and will hire about 30 apprentices in that region.
Founded in 2020, the startup rapidly scaled staff from in 2025 from 30 to now 130, thanks to a $708 million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Smith said.
