English

Abstract

Employers expect universities to play a key role in generating work-ready graduates who are able to act in complex and dynamic working environments, thus, are employable. The employers’ expectation places high pressure onto universities to prepare students for unknown future demands by equipping them with employability enhancing competences. One accepted and often applied method to support the development of these competences are internships. However, empirical evidence on the linkage of individual with contextual factors of the working environment regarding the students’ competence development remains fragmented. To address this issue, a quantitative longitudinal study in a Solomonfour-group-design with 143 German undergraduate students was conducted. The findings reveal that internships are highly promotive for the development of employability enhancing competence, particularly for reflection and learning. The individual’s perception of being empowered and an enabling working environment moderate the latter effect. Moreover, self-efficacy is significantly improved. Based on this, it is recommended to make internships obligatory and improve learning, for example, through progress reports and learning journals and by providing enactive mastery, vicarious experience, social persuasion and physiological arousal. Moreover, empowering learning conditions should be provided, including facilitative leadership, access to information and resources, opportunities for mobility and growth and socio-political support. Additionally, interns should perceive meaningfulness of work and impact on work results, have autonomy and enlarge their perception of self-efficacy, Thereby, the paper contributes to a systematic approach for empowering internships and derives implications for universities, industry and their collaboration.