The Impact of Internship on the Employability of Business Management Graduates: the Indian context

Abstract

The Business Management Graduates who undertake internship training are empowered to transform into a job meritoriously sooner than those who don’t pursue it earnestly. The internship is a channel to prove to the future employer of his or her KSA (knowledge, skills and abilities) along with their behavioral aspects and thereby a platform to exhibit the graduate’s potential to perform in a job. In this empirical learning, the author explored the feasibility of the graduates’ internship outcomes which are ‘conversion to job’ and the ‘confidence level’ gained which gives an edge in the career domain. The study had examined the student’s internship experience and its impact to expedite the predicted outcomes of the internship program. This article also investigates the student’s perceptions of the significance of the internship in terms of the confidence built in the intern to attain a job and the added benefits augmented out of it. The predicted outcomes of the internship program are analyzed with the help of correlation and regression analysis. The results show a strong statistical correlation between conversion to a job and the attained skills through internship such as ‘decision making’, ‘potential to manage’, ‘experiential learning’ etc. The findings also provide a basis for evaluating the importance of a successful internship program in business management education. The results of the analysis indicated that the improvement in the graduates’ attributes is dissimilar with three paths of acquiring the entry into internship viz., ‘through institution’, ‘through candidate reference and the self-initiated internship.