What Do Hospitality Students Find Important About Internships?

Abstract

The study reported herein aimed to determine the importance and value of internships in the hospitality industry to students so that academic institutions, receiving organizations, and the students themselves can better prepare for placements in the future. Content analysis was applied to the placement reports submitted by 279 students at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management in the author's home institution. Based on a simple counting of placement attributes mentioned by the students, the analysis yielded nine themes. How the findings can be used to enhance student satisfaction with internships and how the enhanced internship experiences can help solve career problems are discussed.

How do hotel and tourism students select internship employers? A segmentation approach

“…The variable "friendly colleagues" was retained for subsequent analysis as it had been frequently mentioned by interns in a previous study conducted in Hong Kong (Tse, 2010). The determinant value of the seven remaining variables based on the factor analysis (.001) was greater than .00001, indicating that the multicollinearity problem had been resolved.…”

“…Segmenting the students based on their perceived importance of the criteria (i.e., the third objective of this study) is necessary in this regard. The segmentation approach enriches the literature as existing studies primarily focused on identifying and classifying factors about internship experience (Lam & Ching, 2007;Singh & Dutta, 2010;Tse, 2010), rather than classifying students based on perceived importance of the selection criteria of internship employers. The results of the cluster analyses showed that four groups of students can be identified based on their evaluation of the importance of selection criteria, including learning enthusiasts, social support seekers, brand seekers, and school followers.…”

“…Grounded in the job choice framework (Behling et al, 1968), these items were adapted from previous studies (Cho, 2006;Jenkins, 2001;Lam & Ching, 2007;Tse, 2010), including "relevance of internship to career development," "functional area of the internship," "physical working environment," "comprehensive training program," "friendly colleagues," "brand of the organization," "competitive remuneration," "distance commuting to workplace," "experience of the company as a consumer," and "working in an organization that is affiliated with the university". A 7-point Likert-type scale (ranging from 1 = very unimportant to 7 = very important) was used to capture responses of these items.…”

Revising a Summer Internship Course using Student Evaluations

“…The first of these three items was, "I improved my time management skills" (‫ݔ‬ҧ = 4.66, SD = 0.619). Tse (2010) conducted a content analysis of students' post-internship written evaluations to determine what they found to be most important about their internship experience. One of the nine themes Tse identified was, "personal growth perceived by the student intern" (p. 257), which included time management, problem-solving, and maturity/confidence, among other skills.…”

“…In another study, Tse (2010) conducted a content analysis of students' post-internship written evaluations to determine what they found to be most important about their internship experiences. Tse identified nine themes, including students' working relationships with colleagues, personal growth, experience with leadership, and relevance of internship to academic program and future career, among others.…”