UNDERGRADUATE INTERNSHIP PROGRAM: THE EFFECTIVENESS AND IMPROVEMENT FOCUS

ABSTRACT Internship program is an opportunity for students to gain practical knowledge and skills, as well as cultivate a personality on how to deal with the real working environment. As such, an effective internship program is essential to the career development of students. Finding from empirical review suggested that the questions of how the effectiveness of undergraduate internship programs (EUIP) should be reported realistically and how to identify and prioritize EUIP improvement are remains ambiguous. Hence, this research aims to incorporate multiple measures to assess EUIP for a business school in Malaysia. Additionally, the research also aims to identify and prioritize the EUIP improvement by the evaluation of focus index. Based on empirical finding, this research views EUIP from the perspective of personal, interpersonal and employment impacts that driven by the internship programmes. The research is quantitative based and focused on students from a business school in Malaysia. Structured questionnaire was distributed to 123 students who have completed their internship programmes in year 2020 and 2021, with 96 of them responded. EUIP is analysed via descriptive analysis by incorporating measures of importance and implementation level. Additionally, focus index for the 3 EUIP constructs are calculated to identify and prioritize improvement focus. Finding from the analysis result reveals that the average of EUIP for all the 3 constructs are above 80%, which is suggested as high level of effectiveness, while interpersonal impact is regarded by respondents as under-focused. The research contributes methodologically by outlining a new approach for the assessment of effectiveness as well as the identification and prioritization of improvement focus