Internship Programs Offer Students and Employers Great Value

In the 2010 installments of Collegiate Chapter I would like to focus on internship programs and our industry. In my own research I have come across a number of research articles on internship programs that I would like to outline. The first study, “Undergraduate Business Internships and Career Success: Are They Related?,” by Jack Gault, John Redington, and Tammy Schlager, appeared in the Journal of Marketing Education. This research looked at the relationship between early career success and experience in an internship completed as part of an undergraduate degree. The study built upon findings from previous research that investigated the relationship between marketing education and career success. The researchers found that, “a survey of intern and non-intern business alumni of a northeastern U.S. public university indicated significant early career advantages for undergraduates with internship experience.”

The concept of colleges and business working together to contribute to business education is not a recent one. Internship programs in conjunction with college education date back to as early as 1906. However, the authors found from their review of the literature that the existing research on needs assessments of higher-education in business, concentrated mainly on the impact of formal classroom instruction. And, as the authors point out, “while these earlier findings provide important insights into the effects of internships, they are based on students' pre-graduation expectations, rather than actual post-graduation career outcomes.

Researchers found that those alumni who had internship experience reported significantly higher levels of career success than non-internship respondents in entry-level compensation.

Therefore the question of whether or not students with internship experience were better prepared for entry level jobs and enjoyed earlier career success than those without internship experience remained untested. The authors sought to fill the void in the literature by studying the impact of field internships on the early career success of undergraduate business majors.

Gault, Redington, and Schlager developed their own test instrument which focused on skill category sets related to career preparation in the research literature and interviews of a panel of experts in the field. This work resulted in the selection of 13 skills in four categories that would be used in their career skill preparation measurement scale, namely:

“Academic skills (five items) include: analytical skills; computer applications; creative thinking; information search; and, problem solving. Communications skills (three items) consist of: oral presentation; proposal writing; and, written communication. Interpersonal skills (two items) include: leadership/teamwork and relationship building. Job acquisition skills (three items) assess: job interviewing; job networking; and, resume writing.”

In addition to the above four categories and corresponding skill sets, the authors also gathered demographic and other career experience data, such as, “grade point average (GPA), major area of study, years of work experience, time to obtain first full-time job offer, starting and current salaries, and five measures of job satisfaction,” in their attempt to find out if there was a significant relationship between an undergraduate internship experience and entry-level career success. The researchers surveyed 437 graduates. They received a 33 percent response rate for a total of 144 completed surveys (98 interns and 46 non-interns).

A statistical analysis of the data indicated that both the intern and non-intern alumni respondents received equal classroom preparation for all of the 13 sill areas studied. However, “an analysis of the intern sample responses indicated a significant difference between university and internship preparation for five skill areas. Interns rated the internship as providing a higher level of career preparation in two of the five academic skills (computer applications and creative thinking), two of the four job acquisition skills (job interviewing and job networking), and one of the two interpersonal skill areas assessed, (relationship building).”