Engineering Students’ Industrial Internship Experience Perception and Satisfaction: Work Experience Scale Validation

Teresa Nogueira,Eunice Fontão,Marina Sousa,José Magano,Ângela Leite

doi:10.3390/educsci11110671

Abstract

An essential aspect of higher education institutions’ academic curricula for engineering courses is the students’ industrial internship programs. In the literature, it is well accepted that such programs provide valuable learning outcomes and increase the graduates’ employment prospects. Thus, it is paramount to evaluate the internship programs’ quality to identify opportunities to improve their design and implementation. However, that evaluation typically depends on self-designed academic assessment surveys of questionable validity. The purpose of this paper is to assess engineering students’ perceptions of their internship experiences. For that purpose, the validation of a recently adapted version of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) was carried out on a sample of 447 engineering students that participated in industrial internship programs offered by Portuguese public universities and polytechnic schools. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to confirm the suitability of the model proposed by the WEQ’s authors on this study’s sample. The psychometric qualities were evaluated through convergent and discriminant validity. The results showed that the model fit the sample well, and convergent and discriminant validity was established. The general competencies subscale was the most important for the participants—specifically, the competency of solving problems. Differences concerning the WEQ and gender, company size, and compensation were found and discussed. This study provides researchers in the field with a new tool validated explicitly for engineering students.

Highlights

In the past few decades, higher education institutions (HEIs) have devoted increasing attention to developing mechanisms for facilitating the integration of graduates into the labor market [1], partly driven by the acknowledgment of the high youth unemployment rates, even among educated people, as job competition has become much tighter among tertiary graduates with basically the same credentials [3]
This study aims to assess the perception of the internship experience through the validation of a recently adapted version of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) by applying it to a sample of 447 engineering students from Portuguese universities and polytechnic schools and assessing students’ satisfaction concerning their internship work experience
The results show that the average variance extracted (AVE) and composite reliability (CR) were higher than the thresholds of 0.50 and 0.70, respectively [53]

Summary

Introduction

In the past few decades, higher education institutions (HEIs) have devoted increasing attention to developing mechanisms for facilitating the integration of graduates into the labor market [1], partly driven by the acknowledgment of the high youth unemployment rates (in Portugal, that rate was 25.4% as of June 2021 [2]), even among educated people, as job competition has become much tighter among tertiary graduates with basically the same credentials [3] One such mechanism is the internship, having had a notable increase in recent years [4]. Inceoglu et al [9] found that graduates who completed an internship found employment more quickly

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Conclusion