Enhancing accounting student internship programmes in Malaysia: a framework

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop a framework for enhancing internship programme in order to improve accounting graduates’ improvisation capacity i.e. the ability to deal with complex and unexpected situations in a creative, entrepreneurial, contextual and professional manner, ability to orient and act in conditions of complexity and temporariness, ability to identify opportunities, and try new approaches on the spot from the perspectives of employer, institution and student. All these dimensions are very important to student and organisation as part of the skills required in order to sustain in high competition business world. The first research gap of this study was to look at the micro perspective i.e. student’s improvisation capacity in internship. The effectiveness of internship has been focussed in worldwide but the researches are mainly focus on the perspectives of the employers, understand effectiveness of internship programme from student’s perspective, identify and explore variations in interns etc. However, there was limited study to look into micro level which is how internship can improve a student’s improvisation capacity. The second research gap identified in the study was lack of empirical study on investigates the factors affecting student/individual/employer improvisation from there perspectives i.e. employer, institution and students. There was a critical need to uncover other factors by studying this problem through different key and how the findings would provide better strategies to improve individual/employers’ capacity on improvisation and hence enhance the effectiveness of internship programme. The last research gap is there is limited published research on develop of framework for enhancing internship programme in Malaysia for accounting students. The literature review on effectiveness of internship programme and some critical reviews of existing internship models have been done. Factors affected individual/employer improvisation also been analysed. This study had successfully produced an initial framework to enhance the effectiveness of internship programme for accounting student in Malaysia which will involve the interaction of three perspectives i.e. employer, institution and student on individual/employer improvisation capacity. iv The sequential mix-methods approach was conducted by exploratory qualitative study on employer and institution, following by quantitative study from accounting graduates who had completed their internship programme. In the qualitative phase, in-depth interviews have been conducted to explore and validate the proposed model of the accounting graduates’ internship effectiveness framework. By incorporating the findings from the qualitative phase, a validated framework, hypotheses and survey instrument will be developed to determine the relationship between the factors and student/employer improvisation from students’ perspective. An online survey has been conducted among accounting students. The data has been analysed using Partial Least Square-Structured Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings of the research will postulate an effective internship model for accounting students in Malaysia.